Vienna Philharmonic New Year's Concert 2026 (Wiener Philharmoniker, ORF, WETA Group, PBS, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, January 1) my husband Charles and I watched the annual PBS telecast of the Vienna Philharmonic’s New Year’s concert – or at least the second half thereof, the only part PBS ever shows us. It was conducted by Yannet Nézet-Séguin, a Canadian conductor who in line with the common practice of today (former Fanfare contributor Roger Dettmer lamented in the 1980’s that “death has depleted the ranks of great conductors without life having replaced them in kind”) holds three, count ‘em, three major musical directorships: the Metropolitan Opera, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the Orchestre Métropolitain in Montréal, Canada. (Dave Hurwitz has complained many times that the ranks of the world’s great conductors are being stretched so thin these days, with too few maestros chasing too many jobs.) He’s also 50 years old and is married to a man, Métropolitain Orchestra violinist Pierre Tourville. (I wonder if the other violinists in the orchestra ever get jealous of Tourville for the reason Joan Crawford was jealous of Norma Shearer when they were both under contract to MGM: “How can I compete with her? She sleeps with the boss!”) What I liked about this year’s New Year’s concert was that Nézet-Séguin actually seemed to be having fun; he showed his delight when he was obliged to blow train whistles during one of the selections, Hans-Christian Lumbye’s “Copenhagen Railway Steam Galop,” and for the final “encore,” Johann Strauss I’s “Radetzky March,” he not only turned around and started conducting the audience instead of the orchestra (something I’ve seen other conductors do), he went one step further and actually walked into the audience as he conducted. I joked to Charles that any moment I expected to see the audience surround him in the classical-music equivalent of a mosh pit.

The concert – or at least the one we got to see – began with a Franz von Suppé overture to his operetta The Beautiful Galatea (Suppé was a major pioneer in operetta but virtually none of his works survive in the repertory; the only things of his that get played anymore are his overtures). Then we got a piece by the woman who founded the Vienna Girls’ Orchestra in the 1860’s, Josephine Weinlich (the Vienna Philharmonic was the last orchestra in Europe to break down its official sexism and start hiring women musicians – though it was gratifying to watch how many of them there were in the orchestra last night – and until then women musicians had to content themselves with playing in separate and highly unequal bands like Weinlich’s). The piece was a polka called “Sirens’ Song” and fitted in perfectly with the overall light-music program. So did the piece two items down on the program (with Johann Strauss II’s “Diplomats’ Polka” in between), an even bigger departure from Viennese orthodoxy: “Rainbow Waltz” by African-American woman composer Florence Price. I’ve come to quite like Florence Price; she composed four symphonies, of which three survive, and a number of chamber works that strike me as more emotionally intense and powerful than the orchestral pieces. “Rainbow Waltz” sounded professionally competent even though nothing in it gave away that the composer was either American or Black (though in the scherzos of her surviving symphonies Price went back into her Black heritage and composed them as Jubas, after one of the dances native to Africa).

Then, after the Lumbye piece (a tribute to a newly constructed rail system in Copenhagen), came two pieces by Johann Strauss II: the familiar waltz “Roses from the South”and the lesser-known “Egyptian Polka” – inspired, according to narrator Hugh Bonneville (an excruciatingly boring actor who achieved stardom of sorts on the long-running PBS soap opera Downton Abbey, which I never watched because stories about the class divisions in British society don’t really interest me), by the opening of the Suez Canal, which apparently sparked a Europe-wide fad for Egyptian history comparable to that started by the discovery of King Tutankhamen’s tomb 50 years later. The last piece on the official program was a waltz variously called “Palms of Peace” (the title announced last night) and “Olive Branch” (the title listed on the Vienna Philharmonic’s Web site) by Johann II’s brother Josef Strauss. A number of critics actually consider Josef the greatest composer of the Strauss family because his music is more harmonically advanced than his brother’s, and this peace (composed after Austria lost a war with Prussia and Italy in 1869 and had to give up territory) did have a lighter, more delicate feeling than the works of Strauss Brüder. Then came time for the so-called “encores,” a misnomer if there ever was one because a) there are always three of them, and b) the final two – Johann II’s On the Beautiful Blue Danube and Johann I’s Radetzky March – are stipulated by “tradition” (namely the concert rules laid down by conductor Clemens Krauss when he launched the Vienna New Year’s concerts in 1939 when he figured the Austrian people needed an “upper” after the sever “downer” of having had their country taken over by Hitler and the Nazis), so only the first one is the conductor’s choice.

Nézet-Séguin chose a piece called “Circus Polka” by Phillip Fahrbach (I’m not sure whether this was Sr., who lived from 1815-1885; or Jr., whose dates were 1843-1894), of which the online sources I’ve seen stressed the irony that someone else wrote a “Circus Polka” decades before Stravinsky’s famous one. I’ve sometimes criticized Nézet-Séguin’s opera performances at the Met for being too slow, but last night that was a problem only for the “Blue Danube” (I noticed the concert’s organizers did not have dancers perform to it as they have in previous years, probably because dancers would have had a hard time sustaining their lines at Nézet-Séguin’s slow tempi!). Most of the concert he conducted with ample vim and vigor and gave this light but not trivial music the élan it needs. Overall this was one of the most enjoyable Vienna New Year’s concert telecasts I’ve seen. I was amused by the final credits, especially the listings for an entirely separate crew just to film Hugh Bonneville’s host segments – but I was infuriated by KPBS’s decision to block off the bottom one-quarter of the screen throughout the entire concert for their advertising plug and plea for people to donate to the station. That was already annoying when they did it to the Rodgers and Hammerstein tribute the night before and blocked off one of the chyrons identifying what the song was, what show it was from, and who was performing it. This time they did that to the entire concert and sent me scrambling to my computer to look up the Vienna Philharmonic’s Web site and get the information there. The concert thereby turned into an extended 90-minute “pledge break,” and I’m sure that’s the sort of barbarism we can expect more of as various PBS stations get more and more desperate financially from the sudden and abrupt cut-off of all Federal funding for PBS under a so-called “budget rescission” bill passed on a strict party-line vote in both houses of Congress last year before grass-roots opposition had a chance to mobilize as it had to block previous Republican attempts to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting: another petty triumph of Trump 2.0 against the American people and the common good.