by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I watched the
Vienna Philharmonic New Year’s concert, which we’d seen a bit of on PBS New
Year’s night in the American version — cut down from the over two-hour full
length of the European broadcast from ORF (the legal name of Austria’s public radio
and TV network — the initials stand for “Österreichischer Rundfunk,”
“Österreich” being the actual German name of Austria and “Rundfunk” being the
German word for “broadcasting”) to fit an hour and a half time slot and with an
annoyingly chirpy narration by Julie Andrews — who seems to have got the job
simply because her most famous movie, The Sound of Music, is set in Austria (but in Salzburg, not Vienna!).
The version we watched last night was a download from France, so there was an
added narration by a male, unseen on screen, in French — which got a bit
annoying, especially for the numbers when there was no on-screen identification
of the piece they were playing.
As usual, the concert was dedicated almost
entirely to the music of the Strauss family: Johann Strauss, Sr. (referred to
in the credits as “Johann Strauss, der Vater”) and his sons Johann Jr. (the Strauss, the famous one who wrote “The Blue
Danube,” “Tales from the Vienna Woods,” “Artist’s Life,” et al.), Josef and Eduard. (There was even a Johann
Strauss III, who also composed light music, but he wasn’t Johann, Jr.’s son: he
was Eduard’s!) All told, three of the pieces were by Johann, Sr. (including the
“Radetzky March,” the official march of the Austrian military, which always closes the program — the audience is invited to
clap along in time and the conductor, Mariss Jansons, spent as much time during
this number conducting the audience as conducting the musicians; Charles
marveled at how a bunch of white Europeans can clap in unison to a piece of
music, a skill which seems to elude white Americans!), seven by Johann, Jr.
(including the “Blue Danube,” which is always the next-to-last piece on the program: the ritual is that
the conductor plays the first few bars, then stops, then turns to the audience
and says, “The Vienna Philharmonic wants to wish you a — ” and then the
orchestra says in unison, “Prosit Neujahr!,” which means — as if you couldn’t
guess — “Happy New Year!”), five by Josef, one by Eduard (though not based on themes original with him; it was a
twisted sequence of themes from Bizet’s Carmen shoehorned into a quadrille rhythm), two by
Johann, Jr. and Josef in collaboration and four by other people.
In some ways
the non-Strauss pieces were among the best items on the program: they included
a “Wiener Bürger” piece by Carl Michael Ziehrer, a “Danse Diabolique” by Joseph
Hellmesberger, “Copenhagen Steam Railway Galop” by Danish composer Hans
Christian Lumbye (whose last name is pronounced “Loom-BEE” — I’d always thought
it was “Loom-BYE” but I was wrong) — for which the orchestra’s percussion
section got to play with whistles, sandpaper, woodblocks and other
accoutrements designed to duplicate the sound of an incoming train (much the
same stuff as a radio effects department would have used to do an incoming
train during the golden age of radio drama) while the video portion was actual
footage of a Copenhagen steam train (most of the cut-in footage was pretty
pointless but this was really charming!) and what was by far, musically, the
best piece on the program: the panorama and waltz from Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping
Beauty. The Strauss family’s fare
was effective light music — Johann, Jr.’s unquestioned gift for great tunes has
been keeping their legend in business for over a century now — but they rather
got shown up as only
light-music composers by the inclusion of something by a real master like
Tchaikovsky. (Some day I hope a conductor decides to do a really radical number
on the Viennese waltz tradition and program Ravel’s “La Valse” — his grim
satire on the whole Viennese waltz legend, written while Austria and France
were on opposite sides in World War I — at one of these concerts. It would
certainly sweep away some cobwebs!)
The conductor was Mariss Jansons, a
Latvian-born conductor who came into the world in 1943 after his father and
brother had been killed by the Nazis in the ghetto in Riga; since Latvia was
annexed to the Soviet Union during the war, he had to come up through the
Soviet musical bureaucracy (he was offered an assistant position by Herbert von
Karajan in 1969, but the Soviet authorities made sure he never heard of the
offer) and he didn’t definitively leave until 1979, when he was offered the
directorship of the Oslo Philharmonic — curiously, his Wikipedia page says he
and his second wife Irina now live in Saint Petersburg, but doesn’t specify
whether that’s the one in Russia or in Florida! (He’s worked in the U.S. as
well as Europe, so either is possible.) He conducted the Vienna Philharmonic’s
New Year’s concert once before, in 2006, and judging from his performance this
year he seems competent enough without being a supreme master of the Viennese
style — and he’s also a man with a surprisingly malevolent-looking face: at the
start of one number he looked like the wolf about to eat Little Red Riding Hood
and at the start of another I joked that he was saying to the musicians, “And
if any one of you makes a mistake, I’ll eat you.” Also it was interesting that
the concert featured as many polkas as it did waltzes — one doesn’t think of
Vienna as having a great polka tradition, and indeed a Strauss family polka doesn’t
sound much like “She’s Too Fat” and the other cornball songs that have given
polkas a bad name together, but through the craftsmanship of the Strauss
orchestrations one can hear the polka rhythms.
My favorite versions of “On the
Beautiful Blue Danube” (to give it its full-length title) remain the Victor 78
by Ormandy and the Deutsche Grammophon LP version by Karajan (the latter the
one that was used for the space-flight scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey); after hearing this piece for years chopped and
channeled into a trivial bit of salon music, it was a revelation to hear these
versions, in the original Johann Strauss, Jr. orchestration and at the full
length he wrote, and hear that the piece is really a miniature tone poem in
three-quarter time (and it’s hardly Johann Strauss, Jr.’s fault that in the 20th
century the Danube — the “Donau,” to use its German name — ceased to be
beautiful or blue and became one of the
dirtiest, most polluted rivers on earth). Janssons’ version was good but hardly
at the Ormandy or Karajan level (remember that Ormandy and Karajan came from
the two leading states within the Austro-Hungarian empire — Karajan was
Austrian and Ormandy, originally named Jenö Blau, was Hungarian!); he tended to
take the fast parts too fast and the slow parts too slow — but the piece still
made its effect even though the video portion was a rather banal ballet
routine: I’d have much rather we stayed in the concert hall (the legendary
Musikvereinsaal) and watched the Vienna Philharmonic play one of its trademark
works! There was another ballet sequence elsewhere in the program with three
men and three women, all of whom
looked excessively nellie — I joked that the program director had probably told
the queeniest (and cutest!) of the young men, the one with black hair in a
pudding-bowl cut, “Can you at least make it look like you like girls?”
When I first started
watching these concerts on TV — back when Walter Cronkite was still around to
narrate the PBS versions — he went on and on and on about how tradition-bound the programming was and
I wondered just how the people could stand performing such a concert when the
rules were so specific about what they could or couldn’t play when — but I’ve
come to enjoy and look forward to them as a New Year’s tradition and evidence
that New Year’s music can be something a little more substantial than Guy Lombardo’s arrangement
of “Auld Lang Syne” and an assortment of banal modern-day pop acts (for their
1993 New Year’s concert MTV presented Nirvana, but mostly the “rock” New Year’s
shows go for the most trivial modern-day rock and pop music instead of the
best), even though some of the New York Philharmonic’s New Year’s concerts have
offered still more substantial fare (this year they did Bernstein and Gershwin,
but I recall an especially beautiful show in which they did an all-French
program and rang in the new year with a spectacular performance of Ravel’s
“Bolero”!).
