Olga Neuwirth
*1968, Graz
Work
coronAtion II: Naufraghi del mondo che hanno ancora un cuore cinque isole della fatica
for Flute, Clarinet, Violin, Viola, and Piano (2020)
- 00:00 Pierre Boulez: a rational dreamer
- 02:29 The fluid sounds of Répons 03:43 Musical castaways: on the new piece Naufraghi del mondo che hanno ancora un cuore
- 06:22 Playing with the space of the Pierre Boulez Saal
- 06:53 Keeping music (a)live
Olga Neuwirth was born in Graz 1968, the daughter of a family of musicians—her father was a renowned jazz pianist, her uncle the composer and musicologist Gösta Neuwirth.
She started her musical training on the trumpet and later studied composition at the Hochschule für Musik und darstellende Kunst and the Elektroakustisches Institut in Vienna as well as the Conservatory of Music in San Francisco. Her most important teachers were Adriana Hölszky, Tristan Murail, and Luigi Nono. She first gained international recognition at the age of 22, when her two miniature operas Der Wald – Ein tönendes Fastfoodgericht and Körperliche Veränderungen on texts by Elfriede Jelinek were performed at the Vienna Festival. Olga Neuwirth subsequently collaborated with the soon-to-be Nobel laureate for Literature on several music theater projects, including Bählamms Fest after Leonora Carrington, written in 1997–98 and awarded the Ernst Krenek Prize, and the 2002–03 Lost Highway based on the eponymous film by David Lynch. In 1999, Neuwirth composed the orchestral piece Clinamen / Nodus for Pierre Boulez’s 75th birthday, who conducted the premiere with the London Symphony Orchestra and in 2002 invited her to the Lucerne Festival as composer in residence. Having maintained a deep interest in film, literature, architecture, and visual art since childhood, Olga Neuwirth in her compositions often explores multiple sensory levels and employs the whole range of acoustic and electronic sound creation as well as video art, which she has been using since as early as the 1980s. In addition to composing, she has also created art exhibitions, short films, and multimedia installations, one of which was seen as part of documenta 12 in 2007. Among her most recent works are the operas The Outcast after Herman Melville and American Lulu, a new version and completion of Berg’s opera, both written in New York in 2012, Le Encantadas o le avventure nel mare delle meraviglie for ensemble and electronics, premiered by the Ensemble intercontemporain and Matthias Pintscher at the 2015 Donaueschingen Musiktage, and the large-scale music theater work Orlando, first performed at the Vienna State Opera in December 2019 and also conducted by Pintscher.