It was in 2016 that the three young musicians Severin Neubauer (saxophone), Maxim Tzekov (violin), and Severin Hechwartner (percussion) became acquainted. Aged 15 at the time, the three were rehearsing intensively for an upcoming US tour together with eleven other highly musical members of the Young Masters Ensemble. As they dug into works by Haydn, Mozart, and Köhring—the ensemble’s violist and in-house composer—and then proceeded to perform them in New York, Washington D.C., and Delaware, what arose was more than just musical harmony.
During rehearsal breaks, on long bus rides, and in spontaneous jam sessions in hotel lobbies, the three discovered their shared passion for world music and improvisation. Their budding friendship and their enjoyment of playing together soon led to the birth of a professional ensemble: Trio SMS, whose name references the three friends’ first initials. Today, this trio thrills listeners with CD productions, original compositions, and energetic live performances—and they’re taking the stage once again on 22 November 2025 as part of the Young Masters jubilee concert at the Wiener Konzerthaus, where it all once began.
The story of these three musicians shows beautifully just what the Young Masters programme stands for: namely, making music together as a space of friendship, personality-development, and artistic growth. The Young Masters Ensemble arose from close collaboration between Vienna’s Johann Sebastian Bach Music School and the mdw’s preparatory programmes for gifted young people, which now feed into the mdw Talent Lab.
What developed at the initiative of artistic directors Barbara Gisler-Haase, Wolfgang Aichinger, and Hanns Stekel was a programme that offers young musicians far more than just technical training: in its ensemble work, coaching, and creative concert projects, the focus is on encounters, curiosity, and taking the initiative—as a deliberate counter-model to purely excellence-oriented enrichment offerings.
Travelling, Growing, Looking Forward
Whether it’s to Chile, Japan, the USA, Thailand, or Greece that their concert tours take them, many participants experience these travels as impactful cultural experiences.
At the same time, projects closer to home broaden these young musicians’ understanding of the profession and its present-day demands; whether it’s music mediation-centred family concerts like those of the “Concertino” series at the Wiener Konzerthaus or workshops on improvisation, concert moderation, or mental fortitude and stage presence, the point is always to get to know oneself better and discover new perspectives.
Onstage Tests of Courage
An example of this is the Young Masters Concert Band, which presented itself in the 2025 “prima la musica” competition’s “Creative Ensemble” category with a stage performance developed by the young musicians themselves—a project that showed how self-efficacy, the joy of playing, and artistic self-responsibility go hand in hand in this programme. Winning the federal-level first prize, which was presented to them by mdw Rector Ulrike Sych, hadn’t necessarily been the objective—but it did indeed provide affirming recognition of this successfully mastered “test of courage” that involved going onstage and doing pretty much everything differently than they’d been used to.
Enrichment without Overload
Beyond serving to fascinate audiences, this enrichment programme has also been accompanied by researchers. Young Masters Research has highlighted the core elements of this programme’s effects: in the spaces of encounter that it creates, young musicians learn to assume responsibility for their art, to build self-confidence, and to develop stances of their own. Ideally, they receive sensitive support in all this from their main subject teachers—not with pressure, but with trust. “Challenging them without breaking them,” is how one teacher described this ideal in an interview. The Young Masters programme accompanies young musicians alongside instruction in their main instruments. Its enrichment offerings are individually adapted to each participant in order to create an atmosphere that’s inspiring, reinforcing, and conducive to personal development.
The Young Masters Gala Concert at the Wiener Konzerthaus
Ten years after the official launch of Young Masters, this cooperative project has long since become more than an enrichment programme for the highly gifted: it now functions as a wellspring of possibilities where music can become a school of life, with space for community, creativity, and personality development. Its jubilee concert in the Schubert-Saal at the Wiener Konzerthaus on 22 November 2025 celebrates this approach—with music made by young talents and programme alumni who show just what all can result when enrichment serves to reinforce not only personal abilities but also personal character.
