Alfred Schlee: Publisher and enabler of modern music

French pianist Mathilde Hoursiangou, who was born in Paris and trained there at the CNSM, has lived since the early 1990s in Vienna, where she participates intensively in musical events in all possible chamber music settings and as a soloist.

In addition to her occupation with Classical and Romantic chamber music literature and her passion for ancient keyboard instruments, a focus of her many-faceted repertoire is on early twentieth-century to contemporary music. Work with living composers as well as the discovery and introduction of less-known paths has always been an existential matter to her, which she has championed with conviction and enthusiasm.

Mathilde Hoursiangou has given the premieres or the Austrian first performances of numerous pieces, partly dedicated to her, which are documented by many CD recordings and radio broadcasts. She is a founding member of Ensemble Phace and a free member of Klangforum Vienna. She teaches at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna, where she actively particpates in the latest pedagogical developments in the area of modern music in the curriculum, and is initiator, organizer, editor, and interpreter of the project Strings-Keys, 21 interior space studies for the other piano (2016–21). In 2021 she additionally founded the project input > piano, the goal of which is to provide impulses and to offer – by means of a multifaceted selection of new ways of thinking, perspective, listening, and writing for the instrument – short attractive pieces that perhaps help to bridge the gaps between pianists, composers, and audiences on the traditional concert circuit.

Clarinetist Stefan Neubauer, who hails from Upper Austria, initially studied at the Bruckner Conservatory Linz with Karl Maria Kubizek and subsequently at the Vienna College of Music (today University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna) with Peter Schmidl and Johann Hindler.

He is engaged full-time as clarinetist in the stage orchestra of the Vienna State Opera, but additionally plays on a regular basis as guest clarinetist with the Vienna Philharmonic, the orchestra of the Vienna State Opera, and on the one hand as a chamber musician in the modern music scene – thus he is a member of the Ensemble Wiener Collage and of the ensemble des XX. jahrhunderts – and on the other hand as a member of the Philharmonia Schrammeln Wien (Viennese music) on the “Picksüßen Hölzl” (high G-clarinet).

Stefan Neubauer’s first solo CD “Solitary Changes” with solo pieces of the twentieth century was awarded the Ö1 Pasticcio Prize. From 2013–20 the clarinetist held a lectureship for clarinet at the Leonard Bernstein Institute of the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna, and additionally taught at the Japanese TOHO Academy in Vienna.

Further information at www.stefanneubauer.org