Olga Neuwirth was born in Graz in 1968. She began taking trumpet lessons at age seven but had to give up playing later on due to an accident. In 1986, she went to San Francisco and enrolled at the Conservatory of Music as well as at the Academy of Art College, where she studied painting and film. She eventually transferred to the mdw.
In 2012, an international group of instructors at the conservatory in Zaragoza, Spain joined forces with professors at that city’s university. This team set about gathering support both public and private in order to launch the project Musethica.
On 9 July 2020, former mdw student Gisela Zdenek will be turning 100. Research in the run-up to her birthday celebration led members of her family to the mdw Archive, which in turn drew our attention to this strong-willed woman’s life history—which has always been accompanied by music. We had a birthday conversation with Zdenek about her time at the “Academy”.
This year will see the International Beethoven Piano Competition Vienna held for the 16th time. Its sixth edition, which took place around 40 years ago, was won by an exceptional young musician who can now look back upon an outstanding career as a concert pianist, chamber musician, and university professor: we’re talking about the mdw’s own Avedis Kouyoumdjian.
In 2019, we celebrated 150 years of diplomatic relations between Japan and Austria, and thus one and a half centuries of eventful history that have witnessed the complete transformation of the notion of an Austrian state as well as Japan’s transformation from a “developing country” into a leading industrial power.
Concerts, panel discussions, ceremonies, and opera performances: more and more mdw events can now be streamed live as well as watched after the fact via the mdwMediathek.
In May 2019, a very special transformational concert set an entire school building resonating and reverberating.
Next year, Alessandro Baticci will be returning to what's now his alma mater with a project of his own: DigitAize – Digitised String Instruments.
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