Wien Modern

This year’s Wien Modern festival will be opened by the Danube. To be more precise: Pia Palme is composing »Mit der Donau« (in collaboration with the artist Lisa Horvath), a full-length work that is being created, not least, in the Donauauen National Park and which will be premiered on 30 October 2026 by the ORF RSO Vienna in the refurbished Großer Saal of the Wiener Konzerthaus. Annea Lockwood invites listeners to explore over 50 locations along the river, from the Black Forest to the Black Sea, with her »Sound Map of the Danube«. Kirsten Reese, together with biologist and eco-acoustician Sandra Müller, focuses on the sounds of the forest. Katrin Hornek and Judith Unterpertinger invite you to climb Vienna’s most astonishing mountain; Jean-Luc Hervé brings the sounds of insects to a place historically hostile to them; Dimitri de Perrot makes the soundscape beneath the ground tangible through a deep borehole. Alongside these and numerous other explorations of a wide variety of ecosystems, the programme features Katharina Klement, winner of the 2026 Erste Bank Composition Prize, Francesca Verunelli and Elfriede Jelinek at the Musikverein, a milestone birthday celebration for Friedrich Cerha, Pierre-Laurent Aimard with Mark Andre at the Vienna Konzerthaus, and much more.