On 19 November 2018, the jury of the CARSA—Casinos Austria Rising Star Award—headed by the violinist and former Vienna Philharmonic chairman Clemens Hellsberg—named mdw student Maximilian Kromer the winner of this academic year’s competition, making the 22-year-old pianist the sixth CARSA winner. This EUR 10,000 award aims to support artists as they launch their professional careers.
“The Casinos Austria Rising Star Award is a truly special sort of recognition, since the concept of having outstanding players of all instruments compete as a single group is extremely rare. So I’m all the happier that I was given the opportunity to present myself in such a high-calibre finale,” said an ecstatic Maximilian Kromer. Kromer was born in 1996 and began his training as a musician with piano lessons in Vienna’s music school system when he was only four years old. He studied with teachers including Susanna Spaemann before being admitted to the mdw in 2010, where he was initially taught by Noel Flores. Since 2012, he has been a student of Martin Hughes. Rector Ulrike Sych emphasised the significance of the mdw’s cooperation with Casinos Austria: “Alongside professional-quality training, financial support is also of considerable importance for the careers of young artists. And in this respect, the involvement of Casinos Austria represents a major contribution.” The further CARSA 2018 prize-winners are guitarist You Wu (second place) as well as flutist Lilja Steininger and the Aureum Saxophone Quartet (third place, ex aequo). They share the competition’s other prizes, which are worth a combined EUR 10,000.
The previous winners of the main prize were Raffaele Giannotti (bassoon, 2013), Emmanuel Tjeknavorian (violin, 2014), Katharina Hörmann (oboe, 2015), Marko Dzomba (saxophone, 2016), and Simply Quartet (string quartet, 2017).
You can watch CARSA’s final round and awards ceremony at the mdw Mediathek: mediathek.mdw.ac.at/carsa2018
