Alexander Maria Wagner

Alexander Maria Wagner has been commissioned by the Telekom Beethoven Competition to write a work for 8 pianists and percussion, which was premiered at the Piano Summit on 16 October 2021.

Alexander Maria Wagner (*1995) studied piano and composition with Franz Hummel and Tristan Murail. He is currently working with pianist Pavel Gililov at the Salzburg Mozarteum, where he studied composition. Since September 2019, he has been continuing his studies at the renowned Royal College of Music in London. For this he received the Leverhulme Arts Scholarship.

In addition to numerous performances in Germany (Herkulessaal and Gasteig Munich, Beethoven-Haus and Beethovenfest Bonn, Karlshalle Ansbach, Audimax Regensburg, Max-Reger-Halle Weiden etc.), his concert activities have also taken him abroad (Austria, Switzerland, Czech Republic, Italy, France and the USA).

He composed his first symphony, entitled "KRAFTWERK", at the age of 14. This youthful orchestral work immediately inspired the then chief conductor of the Bulgarian National Philharmonic Orchestra, Alexei Kornienko, so much that he recorded it on CD with his orchestra in Sofia for Oehms Classics. Renowned radio and television stations such as BR, WDR, Deutschlandradio Kultur and 3Sat have also broadcast portraits of Alexander M. Wagner.

Ingo Harden writes in Fono Forum about his second CD with piano works by Bach, Schumann and one of his own compositions: "...amazes from the first to the last bars with the undisguised directness of the playing and the clear, self-assured decisiveness of the statement". / "... grabs hold with tremendous power and temperament, shapes excitingly "finished" and striking, masters the many pianistic and musical hurdles with an overrunning bravura, as if they did not exist at all."

He made his solo debut at Munich's Herkulessaal in January 2016. In spring 2017, the Moscow Radio Symphony Orchestra recorded his Second Symphony and Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto with him as soloist. Last autumn, Wagner made his debut with the Jena Philharmonic Orchestra. Shortly afterwards, a composition scholarship from the Virginia Creative Center of Arts, received for his Viennese operetta "Café Ringelspiel", took him to the USA for several months.

In the past, the orchestra’s work has been exemplified by extraordinary concert projects and various prize-winning recordings, such as the opera Irrelohe by Franz Schreker. The first joint production of the Beethoven Orchester Bonn with Dirk Kaftan, Beethoven’s Egmont, was highly praised by critics and awarded the OPUS KLASSIK in 2020. In 2021, the Beethoven Orchester Bonn recorded the CD Alles Tutti! together with the Kölsch rock band Brings under the direction of Dirk Kaftan.

The orchestra’s history dates back to 1907, when the Beethoven city got an orchestra again after the dissolution of the court orchestra in 1794. Conductors such as Richard Strauss, Max Reger, Dennis Russell Davies, Marc Soustrot and Kurt Masur established the orchestra in the top class of orchestras in Germany. Since the beginning of the 2017 / 2018 season, the Beethoven Orchester Bonn has been under the direction of Before that, Stefan Blunier and Christof Prick were in charge.

Successful concerts and guest performances far beyond the borders of Germany contributed to the orchestra’s good reputation. During the Corona pandemic, the orchestra musicians were involved in various social areas: they performed concerts in their free time in front of and in senior citizens‘, nursing homes and children’s homes, helped run the Bonn Vaccination Centre and streamed numerous concerts. In addition, various digital formats for children, students and adults were created to bring hope and joy through music during the »shutdowns«.

At the beginning of 2021, the Beethoven Orchestra was appointed as a United Nations Climate Change Goodwill Ambassador by the UN Climate Change Secretariat (UNFCCC). This enables the orchestra to develop new forms of sustainable cultural work in the spirit of the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals together with the Climate Secretariat. In the summer of 2021, the Beethoven Orchestra Bonn was awarded the European Cultural Prize for, among other things, »its participatory concepts and the ambition to set out for new musical shores with the audience and its namesake Beethoven.