On 25 February, mdw conducting students participated in a master class on Beethoven’s 5th Symphony at the Vienna Konzerthaus given by Andrés Orozco-Estrada together with the Vienna Symphony.

This versatile artist gathered her initial experiences with community outreach during a voluntary social year in Costa Rica. And by now, she can look back upon numerous successful projects—like developing the All Stars Inclusive Band (the mdw’s first inclusive ensemble) and assuming musical direction of the Wiener Festwochen festival opener.

Richard Strauss’s opera Ariadne auf Naxos is the ideal material for a project that aims to interlace the numerous departments of the mdw – University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. Participants explain just why that is so in a conversation with mdw Magazine.

What kinds of works written for the piano are well suited to helping young players discover the world of contemporary music? What are the technical boundaries within which one can compose innovative piano pieces of pedagogical value that are realisable in lessons and still embody convincing compositions in their own right?

In keeping with the motto “change as a driving force”, this successful and authentic singer, bandleader, and composer—a courageous, powerful woman whose art overcomes divisions in more ways than one—is fighting for better working conditions in her profession and for social justice.

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.

Anna Marboe, born in Vienna in 1996, is a stage director and musician. She studied directing at the Max Reinhardt Seminar, from which she graduated in 2019. mdw Magazine got in touch with this versatile artist recently to talk about her artistic development and creative work.

Wilfried Aigner, a senior scientist at the Department of Music Education Research, Music Didactics and Elementary Music Education, talks about music education’s status, lobbying work for the arts, and music teaching in times of crisis and beyond.