Michael Seifried was born in Wolfsberg, Carinthia, and studied double bass at the Vienna Conservatory, and musicology and art history at the University of Vienna.
Since 1993 he has performed regularly as a guest artist with Klangforum Wien, and in 1996 he became a member of Ensemble Wiener Collage. A year later he joined the Tonkunstler Orchestra of Lower Austria, where he has been principal double bass since 2009. In 2007 he began working with œnm, an Austrian ensemble devoted to new music, based in Salzburg.
Michael Seifried is also in regular demand as a soloist: he gave the Austrian premiere of Kurt Schwertsik’s Double Bass Concerto with the Tonkunstler Orchestra, Vladimir Pantchev has composed two works for him and in March 2022 at the aspekte Salzburg Festival he performed Rebecca Saunders’s concerto for double bass Fury II – a work he also performed at the 2013 Salzburg Biennale.
Seifried is always interested in finding connections between art forms. He has curated the event Mach dir ein Bild vom Klang in the MuseumsQuartier of Vienna and, together with Cornelius Obonya and Wolfram Berger, music-and-literature projects focused on Periklis Liakakis’s re-imaginings of works by Schubert (Winterreise, the Heine Lieder). His cross-disciplinary interests are also displayed in his CD recording of Friedrich Cerha’s Eine Art Chansons (2016) with Agnes Heginger.
