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How It All Began

Boy meets girl: It is one of those unlikely stories in which the son of a village merchant in the middle of West German nowhere becomes a professor of Austrian law and marries one of the daughters of the CEO of the Austrian salt refinery holding and a Polish pianist. But this is exactly what happened. My father was born in Duisburg (of all places) in 1940 and grew up in a small village near Bonn. He then went to study economics and law in Bonn and subsequently followed his professor to Vienna, where he met my mother in 1967. She had a rather adventurous history: Born on a railway platform in Olsztyn in 1943, she grew up in Vienna and originally wanted to study music, but then trained to be a translator before finally graduating with a doctorate in law. In 1970, my parents moved to Linz, where my father became a professor of law and I was born on 2 May 1974. It meant that a homeless family with a strong Viennese connection suddenly had another member of the family as a native Upper Austrian. Nowadays, with my aunt – who was head of the Austrian National Heritage office – and the rest of my family living in Vienna, I feel more Viennese than anything else, albeit with a strong link to Upper Austria. Thanks to my father's background I hold both Austrian and German passports.

I went to school in Linz, which was not what I would call the greatest time of my life. At an early age, I started having music lessons, first with my mother (who in the meantime had also graduated from Brucknerkonservatorium Linz as a music teacher) and subsequently from Helga Schiff-Riemann, the granddaughter of Hugo Riemann and mother of the cellist Heinrich Schiff. It was soon discovered that I suffered from severe hay fever, but also had perfect pitch, which – logical, no? – meant that the piano was a waste, wind and brass instruments were out of the question, and thus the cello was the only option because violin practice was declared unbearable, the viola not even worth mentioning and the double bass ... well ... impractical. In 1982, I started my cello lessons with Wilfried Tachezi at the Brucknerkonservatorium Linz and also continued my harpsichord studies with August Humer. At the time of the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 my father was a guest professor at the university in Trier and I, without really knowing how, won the Austrian Young Musicians' Competition. In 1991, I obtained a diploma from the Brucknerkonservatorium, becoming its youngest-ever graduate at the time. This record was to be broken by pianist Andreas Eggertsberger a few years later.

In 1990, I met Robert Cohen, and my father enabled me to spend school holidays studying with him and soon after with his teacher, William Pleeth in London. Pleeth was to become the greatest influence on my musical and professional development until his death on 6 April 1999. In the first half of the 1990s, I also studied with Maria Kliegel in Cologne, living at my grandparents' house near Bonn. I owe Maria Kliegel a great deal, especially regarding my ability to analyse cello technique, but the musical spirit, style and ethics of William Pleeth have never left me.

Cellist

With a "Konzertexamen" (a terminal performance degree) from the Cologne Musikhochschule, I thought I was ready for the world. Little did I know ... After a few years living in London, I returned to Germany, again to my grandparent's house in Meckenheim near Bonn, this time as its only resident. In 2000, I was invited to take up a teaching position at the Musikakademie Kassel, which I held until 2007. This period included the rather traumatic time surrounding my mother's illness and subsequent death in 2004. In 2002, I had moved to Munich for love, but when my mother was gone, I realised that I was really Austrian at heart. Therefore, in 2005, I took a flat in Vienna and cannot really imagine not having at least a place to go to in this most beautiful of all cities, which I am fortunate enough to call home.

Since the early 1990s, I have received invitations from all over the world to play in wonderful places and work with some of the most astonishing musicians around. Naturally, this has included orchestras (e.g. the Deutsche Staatsphilharmonie Rheinland-Pfalz, the Bruckner Orchester Linz, or both orchestras in Santiago de Chile) and conductors, such as Tecwyn Evans, Patrick Lange, Michael Sanderling or Karlheinz Steffens. As a chamber musician, I am happy to call some of the greatest musicians of my generation not only "partners in crime" but also friends: first and foremost clarinettist Dimitri Ashkenazy, flautist Walter Auer, pianist Stefan Stroissnig and the Acies Quartett, but of course also pianists Christopher Hinterhuber and Roland Krüger, violinist Lena Neudauer, violist Firmian Lermer and cellist Alexander Hülshoff. Besides working with them (and countless others), I seem to have collected quite a number of living legends over the years, including Jörg Demus, Dénes Zsigmondy, Menahem Pressler, Norman Shetler and Eduard Brunner. It is this richness of experience that I feel makes my life so exciting.

In 1990, at the tender age of 16, I had the opportunity to work with Alfred Schnittke during an unforgettable week in Salzburg, and this experience initiated my fascination with direct dialogue with composers. Sofia Gubaidulina, Howard Blake, Graham Whettam, Matthias Pintscher, Jörn Arnecke and many others were to follow, resulting in the premieres of five cello concertos and countless world or national premieres of solo, duo and chamber music pieces over time. However, I have now reduced the number of contemporary pieces that I play to those I feel really comfortable with, as I have become increasingly aware that my entire instrumental education never really enabled me to feel genuinely comfortable with extended techniques or with having to play intervals not based on semitones. It gives me great pleasure to see that there is now a younger generation of cellists for whom overcoming these instrumental challenges is as natural as conquering music of earlier times. However, as the proud owner of the KAIROS label, I have many other opportunities to contribute to and support the contemporary music world, about which I am passionate about as a musician and curator.

Between 2004 and 2008, I published modern editions of all the major cello etudes with Bärenreiter-Verlag and also recorded them for Musicaphon – the combination of which is probably why many cellists exhale with a sigh when hearing or reading my name. I cannot hide some satisfaction, however, when I see these editions peeking out of a young cellist's bag on a bus or the Underground somewhere in the world. Over the years, I have made more than 70 albums for labels including Naxos, Capriccio, Musicaphon, Redcliffe and paladino music, while two crime novels, written with my friend Reinhard Cebulla, provided a rather different excursion into publishing.

I have also founded or directed a number of festivals and concert series, and since 2010 have been an endorsement artist for Thomastik-Infeld, including significant involvement in the development of the Versum and Versum Solo strings. All of this has taken me to wonderful places and brought me together with an extraordinary variety of musicians – while allowing me to accumulate a ridiculous number of air miles, which I increasingly try to reduce through more environmentally conscious travel planning.

New Zealand – a Decade (Plus a Year)

In 2009, another unexpected opportunity took me about as far away from Vienna as geographically possible: to New Zealand, where I joined the University of Auckland as Professor of Cello. For five academic years, I divided my life between Vienna and Auckland, teaching, performing and working with young musicians – and living in a fairly permanent state of jet lag.

By 2014, however, I felt that staying simply because I could stay was not a particularly compelling reason. I resigned from my permanent position and spent the next two years mainly in Vienna, developing paladino, acquiring KAIROS, performing and recording. Then, much to my own surprise, Auckland called again. In late 2015, I was invited to return – this time as Head of the School of Music.

Leading New Zealand's largest university music school changed my perspective on music education, institutional leadership and, not least, on Europe. We fundamentally redesigned the curriculum, put the school on a more sustainable footing and saw student numbers grow. The process was not always comfortable, but it taught me an enormous amount about institutions, about people and about what leadership can – and cannot – achieve.

The University of Auckland will always occupy a special place in my story for another reason: it is the only institution at which I held a permanent position twice – and the only one from which I resigned twice. In 2020, after four years as Head of School, I walked away from tenure again, despite an offer to continue. In hindsight, both decisions involved a fair amount of risk. I have never regretted either.

After more than a decade between New Zealand and Europe, I realised that my professional future lay back in Europe. I returned permanently with considerably more experience, a different view of what universities could be – and no idea that I would soon be given the opportunity to put some of those ideas into practice.

Back in Europe

I remain passionate about music education and the need to adapt it to the realities of the 21st century. After returning permanently to Europe, I spent a year as Chief Executive of the holding company behind JAM MUSIC LAB Private University for Jazz and Popular Music and the Gulda School of Music. It was a fascinating excursion into the world of a young and entrepreneurial university, but then an opportunity arose that was simply too tempting to ignore. In October 2021, I became President of Bruckner University in Linz – the successor institution to the conservatory where, aged eight, I had started studying the cello almost forty years earlier. There was something irresistibly circular about returning to where much of my own story had begun, only this time being given the responsibility of helping to shape its future.

Five Years Later

That responsibility turned out to be rather more consuming – and considerably more interesting – than I could have imagined. Universities are fascinating organisms: full of extraordinary people, great ideas, strong convictions and the occasional reminder that change is much easier to applaud in principle than to embrace in practice.

Since 2021, we have worked to make Bruckner University more international, more outward-looking and more confident about the unique combination of music, drama and dance under its roof. We have strengthened its artistic and academic profile, developed new structures and partnerships, and increasingly asked not only how an arts university should work, but what it should actually be for. Our Strategic Plan 2025–2034 attempts to provide some answers. In 2026, AQ Austria reaccredited the university for eight years. I regard that less as a certificate of arrival than as encouragement to keep moving. Personally, these years have made me more patient with people, less patient with structures and even more convinced that institutions need the occasional disruption to remain alive.

Somewhere along the way, my interest in changing one university also developed into an interest in changing the system around it. Since 2024, I have chaired the Austrian Private Universities Conference (ÖPUK), representing a sector that has developed from a relatively small part of the system into an integral part of Austrian higher education. I also serve as Deputy Chair of both the Board of Trustees and the General Assembly of AQ Austria, Austria's national quality assurance agency. These roles have given me the opportunity to contribute to debates about quality, autonomy, regulation and, ultimately, what universities should contribute to society – debates in which I seem constitutionally incapable of having no opinion.

Apparently, five years were not enough. In 2026, I was appointed President of Bruckner University for another five-year term, until 2031. This makes me particularly happy because I still have considerably more ideas than time – and because I have never believed that excellence is a state one reaches, but rather a process that should make us increasingly aware of how much remains to be done.

Meanwhile, I have stubbornly continued to play the cello, make recordings and curate the labels of HNE Rights. Perhaps that is the most significant change of the past five years: I seem to have transformed from a cellist who occasionally managed institutions into a university president and higher-education policymaker who stubbornly refuses to stop being a cellist.

I am not entirely sure whether this was the plan. It does, however, feel rather right.