About Christian Vranek

in 25 seconds

As a student in Vienna, established a somewhat different concert series for contemporary music.
Co-conceived and realized a symposium on the topic of art universities and business.
Developed seminars on sponsoring, cooperation and anniversaries.
Designed and implemented sponsoring concepts for universities and cultural institutions.
Helped build up and establish a festival theatre.
Tailored a cultural concept for a football club.
Helped save a theatre in Vienna.
Conceived and co-realized the concert series Musikerlebnis Mitteleuropa.
Devised, conceived and initiated the photo exhibition Mozart in Vienna – Selected Scenes from His Life.
Had the privilege of experiencing concert and opera performances live with Carlos Kleiber conducting...
Concepts for corporate boards: why should they continue to support art and culture?
Culture is the treasure of being human. The more technical the world becomes, the more precious this treasure is and will become...
Culture thrives on being lived peacefully!

And in a Bit More Detail

Young and Experimental

Christian Vranek first caused a public stir in 1994 with the redesign of the concert series “les nouveaux jeunes”. As cultural officer of the Austrian Students’ Union (ÖH) at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, Vranek presented musicians performing music of the 20th century. The special concept is based on juxtaposing visual and applied art with music, and is realized in distinctive settings such as the Vienna Secession and the Museum of Applied Arts/Contemporary Art (MAK). Special guided tours and talks sought to awaken additional interest among the audience. “les nouveaux jeunes” attracted an open-minded audience with event titles such as “On Freedom and Form” or “Shostakovich and Africa”, and generated heightened attention, which is so important for every artist at the beginning of their career. Christian Vranek stages art as an open dialogue. Perhaps it is the unconventional, almost matter-of-course encounter with art and culture in Christian Vranek’s life that explains why he integrates both the artistic side and the audience so strongly into the conception of his work. The aim on both sides is to awaken interest, unfold passions and stimulate communication.

Lived Diversity

Born in Vienna in 1971, Christian Vranek began playing the violin at the age of 6, later the piano, studied composition, sang in a choir, wrote screenplays, and engaged intensively with the worlds of concert, theatre and opera. As a soloist, choir singer and concertmaster in the orchestra, he gathered a wealth of experience during his school and university years – the most valuable for him personally being the shaping of constructive togetherness. Vranek cites playing in an orchestra as an example, a metaphor for shared success: everyone has their own voice, their position and their scope for creative input, but only in ensemble does the full splendour of sound unfold.

From 1989, Vranek studied musicology and theatre studies at the University of Vienna, where he was shaped above all by Professors Walter Pass and Wolfgang Greisenegger. Both fascinated with an open, interdisciplinary approach that demanded open-minded thinking.

Mozart, Mahler, Schoenberg, Shostakovich, the age of Expressionism, the Commedia dell’arte, but also film and television were focal points of these diverse studies. Christian Vranek graduated with distinction, devoting his thesis to Gustav Mahler’s Piano Quartet Fragment in A minor.

The Art of Management

Figures from the international cultural world such as Karsten Witt, Franz Sattelecker, Dieter Bogner, Konrad Paul Liessmann, Peter Vujica, Klaus Bachler and Peter Baum, among others, were Christian Vranek’s teachers at the Institute for Cultural Management at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. Here, from 1994, Vranek pursued continuing education in cultural management and received many further theoretical and practical impulses for his work. In the concert series “les nouveaux jeunes” he put many of these ideas to use as cultural officer of the Students’ Union of the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, and in 1995 he was also appointed financial officer. A good year later, in 1996, he was commissioned by the rector of the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, Michael Frischenschlager, to organize the symposium “The Future of Music Universities in the 21st Century”.

A New House, a New State Capital, a Great Challenge

In 1997 he was appointed PR manager at the new Festspielhaus in St. Pölten, near Vienna. For Christian Vranek this was a new challenge requiring a great deal of pioneering spirit. Two months before the opening of this new cultural centre, he took up the task of making a venue with a capacity of over 1,000 visitors appealing to the public in a city of 50,000 inhabitants, and of putting “art close to the hearts” of the people in the region. With a communication concept that relied on the mediation of art and on comprehensible, interesting content, and with the ambitious support of the media, the Festspielhaus found the hoped-for acceptance and positioned itself successfully within the Austrian cultural landscape. Christian Vranek also advocated for very moderate ticket prices in order to make high culture accessible to all social classes. The dance programme in particular became a much-noted audience magnet with guest performances by, among others, the Martha Graham Dance Company and the Rambert Dance Company. Among the personally most fulfilling moments were the performances by the Piccolo Teatro di Milano of Giorgio Strehler’s “Arlecchino”. Encounters with artists such as Robert Wilson, Bobby McFerrin, Hanna Schygulla and Bruno Ganz also remain unforgettable.

Connecting Art and Business

In 2001 the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna commissioned him to organize a symposium on the topic “Art University and Business”. Christian Vranek had already dealt intensively with this subject at the Institute for Cultural Management and at the Festspielhaus St. Pölten. More than 150 companies accepted the invitation to Vienna. Over three days, experts from the fields of art, science and business drew up very clear scenarios for professional third-party funding management.

Cultural Networking in Central Europe

As a management consultant, Vranek put the scientific results of the symposium and his personal experience in dealing with art and business into practice for the International Summer Academy Prague–Vienna–Budapest of the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. His work centred on the reorganization and financial consolidation of the institution. With the concert series “Musikerlebnis Mitteleuropa”, internationalization also took place (including sponsor concerts in Prague, Budapest, Bratislava, Vienna, Kraków, Warsaw, Belgrade and Bucharest), coupled with the establishment of sustainable international sponsoring structures. As a result, both public and private funding were doubled between 2001 and 2004. It is here that Christian Vranek’s interdisciplinary thinking particularly came into its own. From the corporate strategies of the sponsors and those of the Summer Academy, he developed shared scenarios for success in order to support young artists, win public interest among audiences and media, retain customers and tap into new target groups.

Self-Employment on Three Pillars

Since 2004, Christian Vranek has been self-employed in the cultural sector. Consulting, implementation and conceptual work in cultural management, as well as teaching assignments and artistic projects, form the three pillars of his activities. He repositioned the “Institut neue Impulse”, acted as originator of the Ignaz Pleyel Year 2007, and took part in developing the sponsoring concept for the “International Fritz Kreisler Competition” for violin. In 2008, Christian Vranek was engaged as crisis management consultant at the Odeon Theater in Vienna, where he shaped the PR and marketing for the much-acclaimed Austrian premiere of the baroque opera ALCIONE, thereby making a decisive contribution to securing the continued existence of this very special cultural venue.

In the Mozart Year 2006, Christian Vranek realized the photo cycle “Mozart in Vienna – Selected Scenes from His Life”. Based on Mozart’s letters, Mozart’s Viennese life is visualized anew. In the photos, Mozart can be seen, among other scenes, on horseback, with a canary, playing billiards, with his family, or at the organ of St. Stephen’s. Christian Vranek had the idea for the photo cycle, conceived it and directed it. Philipp Horak was brought on board as photographer. The result of this fruitful collaboration was shown in 2006 in Vienna, Dakar and Hanoi, and is meant to broaden people’s image of Mozart across language barriers – an image often stuck in the clichés of a crazy child prodigy – and to inspire a contemporary reception of Mozart. In 2009 the photographs were presented in Cairo at the Opera Metro Gallery.

Since 2005, Christian Vranek has passed on his knowledge to students at the ebam Academy in the fields of sponsoring, fundraising and digital media. In 2007 he was invited to teach cultural marketing and fundraising at the Sakai Academy in Cairo. Owing to the response to this seminar, he was invited in February 2009 to teach cultural marketing at the American University in Cairo. He crowned his professional path with his private life as well: since 2011 he has been married to Lara-Andrea Vranek.

Since 2012, Christian Vranek has also been holding seminars on sponsoring and cooperation, and on how institutions and companies from the fields of art, culture, science and business can work together meaningfully. As a sponsoring expert, in 2012 he was, among other things, invited to the Danube Rectors’ Conference in Prague and to the Economic Talks of the European Forum Alpbach, where the topic “Sponsoring and CSR” was addressed.

In 2015, Christian Vranek was commissioned to design a future-oriented sponsoring concept on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of TU Wien. In addition, among other things, at the 4th EUA Funding Forum of the European University Association in Barcelona in 2018, together with Paul Fairburn, Director of Enterprise and Innovation at Coventry University, he led a master class on the topic “Development of income-generating partnerships”. Owing to the great response to this event, Christian Vranek was invited by the EUA to write an Expert Voice, published under the title “FUNDRAISING CAN HELP UNIVERSITIES ENGAGE WITH SOCIETY”, among others on University World News.

The academic insights and practical professional experience also find their valuable place in seminars such as “The Future of Sponsoring – Perspectives for Successful Cooperation between Art, Science, Culture and Business” or “Sponsoring Compact”. Culture is always work.

Culture Creates Values – Culture Is Always Work

The current developments in Europe and the world, which are anything but reassuring, have also made it necessary to convey the seriousness of the situation differently – namely by complementing “Culture Creates Values” with the slogan “Culture Is Always Work”. It seems that, quite apart from one’s own humanist ideal of education, for many people today culture means entertainment. This makes it all the more imperative to literally wake up people, decision-makers and executives to what is at stake. Art and a lived high culture, together with free science and a future-capable economy, the inclusion of all social classes, and at least the attempt not to give up on any person in their development, are the basis for peaceful coexistence – that is what we should work on, in our shared interest.

P.S. Oh yes, and then there is the great hobby – football. Played since childhood with the same joy as the violin. And then, in summer 2003, the opportunity arose to join in once at Wiener Austria’s so-called “Monday round”. After the match, the club’s treasurer, Franz Fucik, gave my friend (who had brought me along to Austria Wien) and me what amounted to the accolade, with the words: “I want to see you again next week.” And so it happened that a week later we were standing on the pitch playing football with one Joachim Löw. But I don’t want to overtax your attention – suffice it to say that from Joachim Löw, the later World Cup-winning coach of the German national football team in 2014, I learned a great deal, not only about football but also about leadership. An incredibly calm personality, with such positive energy and motivation and great trust, a role model par excellence who is infectious – truly world-champion class. As a thank-you for letting me play along over the years with players such as Peter Stöger, Felix Gasselich, Evgeni Milevski, Werner Hebenstreit, Walter Knaller and Toni Polster, I presented Wiener Austria with a cultural concept for its 100th anniversary – a reading with Peter Simonischek about football and Wiener Austria remains a lasting memory.