Otto Wanke: Carl Orff Competition 2019 States of Mind

Otto Wanke Otto Wanke was born in 1989 in the Czech Republic. He has been living in Austria for 14 years. At the age of 18 he took private composition lessons and at 19 he began studying jazz composition at the Jazz Conservatory in Prague. As a composer he was mainly active in the field of chamber music during this period. For larger ensembles he wrote the piece ''On The Horizont for Big Band and Movements'' for string orchestra. With ''Movements'' he won the composition competition in Brno.
After 2 years in Prague he moved to Vienna where he studied classical composition with Wolfgang Liebhart as well as media and electroacoustic composition with Karlheinz Essl and Iris ter Schiphorst at the University of Music in Vienna and at the MUK. In Vienna he also began to work as a conductor and sound engineer. As an instrumentalist and composer he has already had numerous concerts in various European countries.
In 2013, he began to work with the composer Bruno Liberda. Under his influence he composed his first purely electronic piece ''Breathing Underwater'' for eight loudspeakers and won the composition competition Maarble in Greece. As a result of this success with electronic music he composed stages for violin and electronics and threads for bass clarinet and electronics. These pieces have been performed successfully in several countries, including Spain, the Czech Republic and Lithuania. Since then he has also been working as a performer in electronic music mainly in cooperation with live musicians.
His compositional repertoire now also includes a large number of works that are purely instrumental: for solo instruments, chamber music and orchestra - his orchestral works Morphen (2016) and Shimmering (2017) were premiered at the ''ORF Radiokulturhaus''.
In 2016, he was in the finals of ''Ö1 competition'' (Ö1 is a Austrian Radio Station) and his portrait was broadcasted on Radio Ö1. That same year he won the Gustav Mahler Competition. As part of this project, he has worked on an oratorio with Wolfgang Mitterer, Paul Gulda and Christoph Cech.
In 2017, he won second place in the FIMS competition in Switzerland and received an order for an orchestral piece from the orchestra in Cottbus, Germany. The new orchestral piece will be premiered in January 2018.