2024 mdw Magazine reported on the successful European tour of South Africa’s MIAGI (Music is a great investment) Orchestra and on its many years of partnership with the mdw. This collaboration has since been continued in an impressive way with a concert at Podium Zukunft in Frankfurt on 27 April 2026. The focus here was less on racking up a further guest appearance than it was on continuing the consistent refinement of an artistic idea.

In this mdw Magazine interview, the intriguing genesis of the community music project weites Nahen [Proximate Distance] and the preparations for its performance on the mdw Campus on 3 June 2026 are discussed by Axel Petri-Preis (co-artistic director, Participation and Community), Peter Jakober (co-artistic director, Composition), Bettina Büttner-Krammer (Head of Music Education, Wiener Symphoniker), Lukas Kobermann (conductor of the wind ensemble Blasmusik Kagran), Mariia Pysmenna (secondary school teacher, MS Johann-Hoffmann-Platz), and Emir Handzo (secondary school teacher, MS Brüßlgasse).

In order to afford women composers a more visible presence in piano lessons, the Ludwig van Beethoven Department launched a three-phase project that links scholarship, artistic practice, and media visibility. The objective was to establish a more diverse repertoire in the realm of instrumental training.

The reason for this conversation is a new critical edition of Arnold Schönberg’s sole completed work for organ, Variations on a Recitative op. 40, for Universal Edition.

This past August saw the MIAGI Orchestra along on its seventh European tour, during which it played in renowned concert halls such as the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, and the Konzerthaus in Berlin. Under the baton of David Panzl (mdw), the orchestra’s young musicians wowed audiences with unique arrangements of material ranging from South African compositions to works inspired by the African diaspora.

In April of this year, the week-long festival “Balladen für einen Bulldozer” [Ballads for a Bulldozer], the first of its kind at the Department of Composition Studies and Music Production, offered an impressive platform on which to present and reflect upon contemporary music.

In November and December 2022, it was time to continue deepening the ongoing orchestral collaboration between the CNSMDP – Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris and the mdw – University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna ... this time in Paris.

Last November witnessed the release of Interploitation, this busy artist’s third solo album. Situated entirely within the cosmos of electronic sound, it bears witness to a radical step by an exceptional cellist.

Joe Zawinul was born in Vienna on 7 July 1932 and grew up not far from the mdw Campus in Vienna’s 3rd district. He eventually came to number among the 20th century’s most influential jazz musicians. And now, the big.mdw.band—the University’s big band at the Department of Popular Music—has taken what would have been Zawinul’s 90th birthday as an opportunity to engage with his music and life’s work in a three-semester concert trilogy.

Most people know the saying that dreams are often like soap bubbles and can easily burst. The music video A bubble is a nice friend to have, released in 2022, is about precisely such soap bubbles and how it’s extremely important to have dreams and also live them—even while being conscious of their fragility.