From the Podium: Katharina Wincor’s Path to Conducting
David Lewellen
PUBLISHED
Tagged Under: 2025.26 Season, Conductor, Guest Artist
As a native Austrian and resident of Vienna, conductor Katharina Wincor couldn’t escape the classical music tradition even if she wanted to. Fortunately, she leans into it.
Wincor will make her debut with the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra on April 10-11, leading a program of music by Webern, Schumann, and Shostakovich.
Vienna was the birthplace or adopted city of many great composers over the past three centuries, and it still holds a position as one of the epicenters of Western classical music. It might be intimidating for a young conductor, but Wincor said, “The culture is very close to me.” The city’s musical life is “a luxurious situation,” she said, with multiple publicly funded orchestras that fill different niches.
Wincor grew up in a musical household, singing in a children’s choir and experimenting with different instruments. “Conducting was one more thing to try out,” she said, “and it was exciting and interesting, and it was when I was about to finish high school.” She studied conducting in college and came to love it even more, partly because it included “matters of leadership and psychology and planning.”
The most common path to conducting involves first learning to play an instrument at a high level, but Wincor said, “I have to understand certain things from the outside. I talk to orchestra musicians, and I talk to my friends who are musicians, and the conversation can get rather technical. That gives me insight into what’s important.”
An important part of her growth was her stint as the assistant conductor of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, leading a heavy load of community and education concerts. Among other things, she said, “It gave me insight into all the parts of the organization.” As a European, she needed that education in the logistics of how American orchestras work, doing lots of different repertoire on little rehearsal time and without public funding.
The two other works on the program she will lead in Milwaukee, by Webern and Shostakovich, were both written in the early 1900s by composers at the beginning of their careers. “In the beginning of the 20th century, so much was happening stylistically,” Wincor said, “and it’s interesting to see the different cultural backgrounds.”
Anton Webern became famous as a disciple of Arnold Schoenberg’s twelve-tone system of composing, but the Passacaglia on this week’s program predates that phase in his career. But Wincor said, “He was already thinking in a very structured way, and he could do mathematical patterns. He took this Baroque form and built it with counterpoint and imitations and canons.”
She is also looking forward to the Schumann piano concerto, which she loves, and to working with pianist Polina Osetinskaya for the first time.
For her first visit to Milwaukee, or to any new orchestra, she said, “The first rehearsal is an unknown situation, but we’ve all experienced it plenty of times. Everyone is trying to figure each other out, and ideally, we’ll find answers quickly, but the process is something we’re all used to.”
The repertoire that feels like her comfort zone is the Classical and Romantic period, she said, and “a lot of orchestras don’t perform it enough. I’ll do a Mozart symphony, and maybe they’ll say that they haven’t done one for a year.” She also feels a kinship to the Second Viennese School that developed the atonal system in the early 20th century, of which Webern is a representative.
Following her time in Dallas, Wincor has been a freelance conductor, making her living from plentiful guest engagements in Europe, along with several weeks a year in the United States and elsewhere. “It’s very important to freelance, because it’s an opportunity to go in so many directions,” she said. “Now I know better who I am as a musician.”
