Vienna-based pianist Sylvia Bruckner, born in 1951, is one of Austria's most important musicians in the field of free improvisation. She’s a musical partner of colleagues such as Hamid Drake, John Butcher and Joelle Leandre and is also an accomplished interpreter of contemporary chamber music. Her style is characterized by a wide range of colors and expression, using the entire instrument, including the preparation of the strings. In this way she expands tonality, literally freeing it from its constraints, working with sound clusters, new harmonic forms, extroverted musical and dramatic actions. Their main stylistic characteristics are impulsivity, a preference for extreme contrasts, intensity, and total musical embrace. She creates her own sonic worlds, sometimes using whatever comes into her hands by chance: violin bows, pieces of marble, moistened household sponges, toys and much more. Sylvia Bruckner takes great pleasure in experimenting with independent sound production, which “makes me happy when it meets open ears, which can help me get carried away by starting my own journey, inspired by becoming curious about what was not there before.” Influences from her everyday life, literature (including her fellow countryman Ernst Jandl) and architecture create this playful attitude.

But Bruckner decided not to record her improvisations on Austrian Wood on the piano, but rather on the zither - a central instrument of Austrian folk music. Taught to play the zither by her father as a child, this instrument was always Sylvia's second source of expression for her spontaneous improvisations, alongside the piano. "We hear a wealth of emotions and surprising structures. Despite its diversity, this music of different tones and non-tones is held together by the power of creative imagination. Sylvia Bruckner treats her zither as an equal partner in the musical dialogue," says Adam Thaler.

Sylvia Bruckner is regularly invited to international festivals such as the Nickelsdorf Confrontations, the Intersections Festival at Disobedience in Ljubljana and many more.