April 2018

A few days ago, Booking.com bestowed upon us the "Guest Review Awards 2017"!

NINE points (out of 10)

Our Booking.com guests have given us Top grades for "our exceptional hospitality"!
   
We are really HAPPY about this and would like to THANK all of our guests for contributing to this special award!    
 

This year again, the 22nd of April is a date to mark on the calendar for all runners. The 35th Vienna City Marathon, this time featuring the "Theatre of Emotions" theme.

Unfortunately, we are not able to reduce the distance to the finish line; however, Hotel AUSTRIA can help you replenish your strength before the start. As in previous years, this Sunday, we will lay on a special earlier breakfast buffet for all our runners for an optimal start to the day.
 

The Vienna City Marathon – a true "theater of emotions" – leads 42,000 runners from 125 nations past Vienna's most beautiful sights on 21 and 22 April 2018. A million spectators along the route will provide the necessary motivation.

Sightseeing and marathon past Vienna's most beautiful sights? The Vienna City Marathon, Austria's biggest sporting event, makes that possible. Our tip: register today!
At the exciting main event on Sunday, 22 April 2018, there will again be competitions for participants of every age and ability. Apart from the marathon over the classic distance, the half-marathon and relay marathon for teams of 4 people on the day of the marathon, there are children and youth competitions and a 10 km run that starts at the Giant Ferris Wheel one day earlier on 21 April.

As always, the starting shot for the main competition will be fired at the Vienna International Centre. The route continues over the Reichsbrücke through the Prater, along the Ringstrasse, past magnificent buildings, and then from the Vienna State Opera out to Schönbrunn Palace and back again to the Ringstrasse and Prater. The finish line is finally reached between the Burgtheater and City Hall.

With the theme for the year "Theater of Emotions", the Vienna City Marathon combines the joy of life, the diversity of cultures and the social Viennese tradition of drama with sporty, emotional moments.

In recent years, the Vienna City Marathon has developed into a platform for social and charity projects and numerous participants get involved for their favorite ones. Consequently, over €182,000 in donations were raised last year.

From May 11, the Vienna Festival will show five weeks of international stage art: 30 productions from the areas of music, theater, performance and dance. There's also a club culture aspect again.

Artistic director Tomas Zierhofer-Kin brings lots of different genres and artists to Vienna again for his second run of the Vienna Festival. The opening is a feast for everyone: the Vienna Festival gets under way at Vienna's City Hall Square on May 11. The free open-air concert has delighted thousands of people year after year and is broadcast around the world.
No fewer than 40,000 tickets will be issued for the festival. Among the 30 items on the program, 21 are dedicated to musical theater, dramatic theater and performances. Lots of productions are set to grab people's attention. 

F23, a former coffin factory, is the stage for "Hyperreality", a sub-festival for club culture. Experimental electronic music at the interface of performance, pop and visual art will be performed here for three whole nights. The club is intended to serve as a space of possibilities, beyond the bounds of reality. Music is a means of expression and liberation.

Guests at Hyperreality include the Venezuelan musician, singer and producer Arca (May 24), the eloquent pop diva Kelela from the USA as well as the Detroit electro-legend DJ Assault (May 25) and the Berlin rapper Taktloss aka Real Geizt (May 26).

Vienna Festival 2018, May 11 to June 17, 2018, various venues
Program, information, tickets: www.festwochen.at

The Vienna Musikverein launches its own, new festival on May 6 - with a focus on Debussy, Bernstein and Beethoven, with almost 60 concerts and with many great names.

The Musikverein Festival Vienna offers an impressive 70,000 tickets, 36 performance days, twelve guest orchestras as well as first-class international conductors and soloists: Performers include Martha Argerich, Daniel Barenboim, Maurizio Pollini and Hélène Grimaud on the piano, Julian Rachlin on the violin, and Elisabeth Kulman, Diana Damrau, Ian Bostridge and Michael Schade as vocalists.

A music festival at the Musikverein is inconceivable without the Vienna Philharmonic: Conducting the Philharmonic concerts during the new festival are Zubin Mehta as well as Mariss Jansons and Andrís Nelsons.

Franz Welser-Möst and the Cleveland Orchestra perform all of Beethoven's symphonies as part of their "Prometheus Project".

Leonard Bernstein is honored on his 100th birthday with concerts: by the Vienna Philharmonic under Zubin Mehta, by the Philadelphia Orchestra under Yannick Nézet-Séguin and by the ORF Radio Symphony Orchestra Vienna under Cornelius Meister.

Claude Debussy once stood at the conductor's podium of the Large Musikverein Hall himself as a much admired guest. One hundred years after his death, Daniel Barenboim conducts the Staatskapelle Berlin in three Debussy concerts. The program includes the mystery play "Le Martyre de Saint-Sebastien" with the singers Anna Prohaska and Marianne Crebassa, and has Maria Furtwängler in the speaking role.

The Staatskapelle and the Berlin Philharmonic travel to Vienna from Berlin. Sir Simon Rattle, who took over from Claudio Abbado as principal conductor at the Vienna Musikverein in 2002, bids farewell to Vienna's music fans as conductor of the "Berliner".

Musikverein Festival Vienna 2018, May 6 - June 10, 2018

Department store heiress Heidi Goëss-Horten is making her top-class private art collection accessible to the general public at the Leopold Museum for the first time: works by Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Marc Chagall, Pablo Picasso, Alex Katz, Andy Warhol, Damien Hirst and many more can be seen.

Heidi Goëss-Horten has been collecting art since the 1990s. Her approach to the works is a very personal one: from the outset, she wanted to live with the art she had acquired. Over many years, she has purchased top-level pieces at numerous auctions around the world. She is now making this art collection, one of the most important in Europe, accessible to the general public for the first time: The exhibition "WOW! The Heidi Horten Collection" at the Leopold Museum shows 170 works from more than 100 years of art history. German Expressionism and American pop-art from the biggest groups of works.

Horten also deals thoroughly with the backgrounds of individual works. For example, the exhibition includes Franz Marc's "Rote Rehe I" and Roy Lichtenstein's "Forest Scene": Marc's painting was the direct model for Lichtenstein's monumental painting. Also on display are exhibits by Marc Chagall, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Paul Klee, Gustav Klimt, August Macke, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, Edvard Munch, Pablo Picasso, Egon Schiele, Francis Bacon, Georg Baselitz, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Lucian Freud, Damien Hirst, Alex Katz, Yves Klein, Robert Rauschenberg, Gerhard Richter, Andy Warhol and many others.

WOW! The Heidi Horten Collection, February 16 to July 29, 2018
(Free admission to the Leopold Museum every Thursday from 6.00 pm to 9.00 pm)
www.leopoldmuseum.org

The Augarten Porcelain Manufactory in Vienna celebrates its 300th birthday with two big exhibitions.

Founded in May 1718 through the granting of an imperial privilege to make porcelain to Claudius Innocentius Du Paquier, the Augarten Porcelain Manufactory in Vienna set aesthetic standards from that time onward. Under Maria Theresa, the manufactory came into imperial ownership, in the classical period it attained a global reputation. After the Congress of Vienna (1814/15), the filigree pieces found their way into the royal and imperial courts of Europe and into the homes of the aristocracy. The Industrial Revolution caused a decline in the craft, which ended in the closure of the manufactory in 1864. The Augarten Porcelain Manufactory only reopened again in the Augarten Palace in 1923 and has hired contemporary artists to design its porcelain ever since.
To mark the 300th birthday of the Augarten Porcelain Manufactory, the Augarten Porcelain Museum presents its anniversary exhibition "eternally beautiful. 300 years of Viennese porcelain" (March 19 to October 15, 2018). At its center stands the dialog between the designers and the users of Viennese porcelain. Selective exhibits of innovative artists and designers of their respective epochs are shown: Marvels of the Baroque, cheerful objects of the Rococo, shiny gold porcelain of the classical period, simple pieces of the Biedermeier, fine creations of Art Deco, colorful figures of the 1950s and contemporary objects. Part of the presentation focuses on the designers who are currently cooperating with the Augarten Porcelain Manufactory to help shape the exhibition area.

Since its found years, the MAK – Austrian Museum of Applied Arts/Contemporary Art has kept the heritage of the manufactory safe and dedicated itself to the research of porcelain. The exhibition "300 years of Vienna’s Augarten Porcelain Manufactory" (May 16 to September 23, 2018) offers an impressive overview of Viennese developments in the context of Asiatic forerunners and European competitors, such as the manufactories in Meissen, Nymphenburg, Berlin, Frankenthal, Doccia (Italy) and Sèvres (France).

Eternally beautiful. 300 years of Viennese porcelain 1718-2018, March 19 to October 15, 2018
www.augarten.com