Audition preparationfor flute players

Iris Maass is an Austrian flutist and teacher based in Vienna. She studied flute performance at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna with Sonja Korak, holding a Master’s degree in Concert Performance and a Bachelor’s degree in Instrumental Music Pedagogy, and is currently completing an MBA at Middlesex University London.

At sixteen she won third prize at the Severino Gazzelloni International Flute Competition in Italy. The following year she was the overall winner of the International Flute Competition Flautiada in Bratislava. Further first prizes followed in Bratislava, Varaždin, Klosterneuburg and Vienna, along with three Gold prizes at the Austrian national Prima la Musica competition — where she now sits on the jury herself.

As a soloist, Iris Maass has performed internationally and was given the opportunity to present a solo recital at the Wiener Musikverein as part of the Jeunesse Start-Up concert series. She has also appeared with orchestras including the Košice State Philharmonic, the Kharkiv University Orchestra, the Tyrolean State Youth Orchestra and the Franz Schmidt Chamber Orchestra. Her concert activity has taken her to Japan, Ukraine, Italy, China, Slovakia and Germany. In 2018, she participated in the Naxos recording Die Symphonie des Lebens with soprano Eva Lind. She regularly performs with a variety of orchestras and ensembles throughout Austria, and has held fixed-term contracts as second flute and piccolo with the Volksoper Wien and the Stadttheater Baden, as well as working as a substitute musician with the Volksoper Wien, Synchron Stage Vienna and Bühne Baden. Her professional experience spans opera, symphonic repertoire, chamber music, studio recordings and traditional Viennese concert programmes.

Since 2020 she has taught flute at the Johann Sebastian Bach Music School in Vienna, where she leads the gifted students programme for flute and teaches in the Special Classes, a collaboration with the Leonard Bernstein Institute at the mdw. Her students have been admitted to music universities and have won prizes at national and international competitions. In 2022 she was appointed assistant director of the school.

Her teaching draws on more than her playing. She trained in breathwork, and before music took over she was a competitive athlete in vaulting. Breath, physical awareness and mental resilience are treated here as part of musical development, not as something that sits outside it.

Having faced competitions, auditions and professional performance from an early age, she knows the pressure young musicians live under. Difficulty, self-doubt and stage anxiety are not evidence of insufficient talent — they are part of what this work does to people, and they can be worked with. Her aim is that her students leave with the technique and artistry a career demands, and with the confidence to sustain one.