Stefanie Boltz

In the organizer's words:

FEMALE
Music made by women - a journey through centuries

They were always in demand as muses. For centuries, however, creating art and music themselves was no less absurd for women than doing politics, playing soccer or flying airplanes. "Giving birth" is indisputably their domain: despite all adversity, strong female musicians have followed their calling and created music of individual beauty for centuries. However, they were and are - even in times of quotas and gender acrobatics - not as visible as they are today.

Hildegard von Bingen, Alma Mahler, Nina Simone, Kate Bush, Bessie Smith & Ma Rainey are just a few examples of women who were sometimes celebrated, sometimes forgotten and sometimes recognized too late. Who overcame hurdles and scaled unimagined peaks. In the FEMALE program, heroines from the Middle Ages and classical music, pioneers of the blues, 'women in jazz' and contemporary songwriters - together with Stefanie Boltz - take to the stage.
Stefanie Boltz and Christian Wegscheider want to follow their individual paths. Collage-like snapshots of the artists' lives and times bring us closer to their lives, reflections and longings as well as their works.

Stefanie Boltz (vocals)

Stefanie Boltz has become an integral part of the German-speaking concert scene. For years she has been pushing the boundaries of the voice-bass duo 'Le Bang Bang' with Sven Faller, and has also been in the limelight as a leader and songwriter under her own name for 8 years. She also runs a concert agency and curates her own festival formats, most recently as artistic director of "Alpenrausch" at Gasteig HP8 in Munich. Together with Christian Wegscheider, she founded "JAZZBABY" in 2021, an ideology-free project between blues, chamber music and song or chanson - with jazz as the big bracket. Their music and sees itself as a platform for 'courageous music'. Courage not only for the musically unusual, overcoming genres, but also courage for a lot of emotion, outburst and escapism.

Christian Wegscheider (piano)

Christian Wegscheider began his career as an autodidact on his father's home organ with foot bass and rhythm machine. He later studied jazz piano at the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz and was awarded the Austrian State Scholarship for Jazz in 1993. In the 1990s he lived in NYC as a freelance musician and studied privately with Gary Dial. Back in Europe, he developed a reputation as a much sought-after jazz pianist and took part in countless productions as a composer and arranger. Wegscheider has worked with the Jazzorchester Tirol, the Pepe Lienhard Big Band (Udo Jürgens), Willi Resetarits, John Arman, Leroy Emmanuel and Florian Bramböck, among others, and has released numerous albums of his music. Wegscheider also devotes himself intensively to composing for classical ensembles, including commissioned compositions for the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra, the Tyrolean Symphony Orchestra, Instrumenti, the Central Saxon Philharmonic Orchestra and the Tyrolean Jazz Orchestra. He is also a lecturer for jazz piano, theory and jazz history at the Mozarteum Salzburg. He gives advanced training courses and youth workshops. In 2012, he received the German music publishers' "Best Edition" award for his instruction booklet "JazzClub".