Antonia is a contemporary composer living in Vienna, Austria. Her passion for music started at a very early age. As she just turned six, she opened a big heavy door of the music school to do the entrance exam. “I remember I just walked in and asked someone if I could do the musical ear and rhythmic tests to be able to learn how to play the piano”, says Antonia. The lady asked the child who had brought her to the school, to which she replied that she lived just around the corner, so she came alone. Antonia discovered she could hear things that most kids could not. She was accepted instantly and they assigned her one of the top teachers.
“When I told my parents I had enrolled myself at the music school they were taken by surprise”, she recalls. Although her parents were modest working class, her loving Mum immediately took a second job to be able to afford a piano for Antonia. She started composing her first pieces when she turned 11 (from those days you can hear her first composition, Tamed Courage, on her first album A Secret Vision).
A dark side of the story was that her teacher, although a wonderful pianist, was a bad pedagogue, often smelling of alcohol. He hit Antonia’s fingers and shouted at her whenever she would make a mistake. Her parents sadly did not have the means to pay for private classes on a long-term basis. “I was so afraid of these lessons and of my teacher that I was trembling while playing in front of him. After many years of struggle between my love for the instrument and my teacher’s tyranny, I finally decided to stop attending the school. It was a very painful decision and moment in my late teens, but I couldn’t go on like this. I deeply buried my passion for music back then.”
It was many years later when her husband bought her a digital Yamaha piano as a birthday present that her old passion began to surface again. As time went by she spent more and more time playing, her fingers happily finding their way. “Music slowly came back to me, and on one grey, rainy day I was inspired and wrote Rain. In 2001 as I was six months pregnant with my daughter I composed Expecting Nina. More and more I kept hearing music in my head – recently I finished my 39th composition,” says Antonia. From shy beginnings, more and more tunes kept on coming, like an eruption from a volcano that was inactive for years.
By listening to her innermost instincts and intuition, Antonia realized that music is her life. A strong encouragement from her family, friends, students, and the US Whisperings Radio founder and director, David Nevue, has helped confirm this intuitive decision. Since April 2009, her compositions, Rain, Expecting Nina and Inspiration, have been broadcasted on www.solopianoradio.com radio station. Recently she has been committing more energy and time to record her music, and is working as a composer on several projects with a photographer and a poet, Alison Wilson. They recently published a DVD, Expressions, Spirit in Nature, on the Lofoten Islands, Norway. Antonia knows that she will never again let music slip away from her life.
Her first album A Secret Vision is a selection of the first 11 songs that had an emotional impact on people she played them to. She decided that if a song made someone cry or smile, or would evoke some other feelings, it was good for the album. For the recording in the Vienna Classic Arts Waldegg and Hajek ton studio she used the August Foerster grand concert piano. In this hectic world, full of crisis, it is soothing to listen to the serene melodies of her soft sound piano music.
Her second album, In My Soul, is coming out in Summer 2009. It is a collection of more classically sounding melodies that were inspired by very joyous as well as sad moments during the past few years.
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