Olga Neuwirth (born 1968)
Olga Neuwirth was born in Graz, Austria, the daughter of pianist Harald Heuwirth. She took trumpet lessons at an early age but then gravitated to composition after high school workshops with composers Hans Werner Henze and Gerd Kurz. She studied music at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and art at San Francisco Art College and was later influenced by composer Luigi Nono.
Olga Neuwirth composes with a variety of modernist and post-modernist vocabularies, with influences from art, architecture, literature, history, and literature. Her works are often collaborative and theatrical in nature. Her 2019 opera Orlando (based on the Virginia Woolf novel) was the first full-length opera to be commissioned by the Vienna State Opera. It is available on DVD and Blu-ray. Here’s a little promo:
The following video is three excerpts of her Homage a Klaus Nomi — wild, over-the-top settings of nine songs associated with the late German countertenor, conceptual artist, and new wave sensation Klaus Nomi: “Simple Man,” Purcell’s “Cold Song,” and “Ding, Dong! The Witch is Dead.”
Here’s a sonically spectacular 2009 string quartet with the exceptionally appropriate title "in the realms of the unreal":
In the Realms of the Unreal is the title under which American novelist, artist, and janitor Henry Darger compiled over 15,000 pages of stories and illustrations about the adventures of the Vivian girls, and is also the title of a 2004 documentary about Henry Darger.
I’ve found five performances on YouTube of Olga Neuwirth’s 2016 solo piano romp Trurl-Tichy-Tinkle. Here is one of them: