by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I stayed in last night and watched a four and
one-half hour block of programming on KPBS, starting with the Vienna
Philharmonic’s annual New Year’s Eve concert — or at least as much of it as
American TV vouchsafes us, cut to an hour-and-a-half time slot (the full
broadcast on Austria’s ORF public network can go up to 2 ½ hours, including all
the “B”-roll ORF shoots so stations in other countries can fill out the program
with documentary footage on Vienna and some of the locations associated with
the music, including — this year — the Hermes Palace Emperor Franz Josef built
for his wife, Empress Elizabeth, with its wall decorations based on the
surviving ruins of Pompeii), with Julie Andrews as host (she succeeded Walter
Cronkite when he passed) because she starred in The Sound of Music and therefore has an indelible connection with Austria
in the minds of America’s mass audience (even though The Sound of
Music takes place in Salzburg, not
Vienna!). Well, it’s better than having Arnold Schwarzenegger (probably the
world’s most famous Austrian since the death of Hitler) do it … Anyway, they
seem to have truncated the concert by eliminating its entire first set and
starting the show with the overture to Franz von Suppé’s operetta Pique-Dame (The Queen of Spades), a work I’ve never heard of and therefore I have no
idea whether it’s based on the same Alexander Pushkin short story as
Tchaikovsky’s opera of the same title; the Wikipedia page on the Suppé work
says it’s “very loosely” based on Pushkin but delivers a synopsis — “The story
concerns the tribulations of the young lovers, Emil, an impoverished composer,
and Hedwig, the daughter of a wealthy widow. Hedwig is in turn pursued by her
guardian, Fabian Muker, who is also in love with her [and her fortune]. Through
the efforts of Judith, a fortune-teller and Emil’s foster mother, all ends happily
with Emil and Hedwig able to marry, and Hedwig’s guardian revealed to be Emil’s
uncle” — that doesn’t sound at all like Pushkin’s dark, cynical tale of a
greedy gambler hounding an old woman to death for a supposedly foolproof system
of winning at cards, which Tchaikovsky and his librettist, his brother Modest,
adapted fairly faithfully.
That was followed by Carl Michael Ziehrer’s waltz
“Right This Way” — Andrews’ narration mentioned that Ziehrer was the last court
composer of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the only one who wasn’t a blood
Strauss — which served as accompaniment for a dance number by the Vienna State
Ballet in which the women were dressed in fancy gowns of different colors while
the men were all dressed in blue uniforms — “Why are the ladies dancing with
the bellboys?” I joked — and then the concert, conducted by L.A. hotshot
Gustavo Dudamel, went into what was by far its best number: the “Moon Chorus”
from Vienna Philharmonic founder Otto Nicolai’s opera The Merry Wives
of Windsor and representing a scene in
which the townspeople of Windsor have disguised themselves as fairies and
sprites in their attempts to fool Sir John Falstaff. The chorus was an
absolutely gorgeous piece which makes me curious about the entire opera —
Nicolai died tragically young and this was virtually his only major work as a
composer, and it’s been largely overshadowed by Verdi’s opera Falstaff on the same story, but from this number it sounds
like it would be well worth investigating. Anyway, this year’s Vienna
Philharmonic New Year’s concert seemed even more skewed towards the Strauss
family in general, and Johann Strauss, Jr. in particular, than usual: Johann,
Jr. was represented by the “Pepita” polka, “Extravagant” waltz (used as
background for “B”-roll of the Lipizzaner Stallions), a “quick polka” called
“Let’s Dance” that was introduced at one of Empress Elizabeth’s big parties, a
lovely and lesser known waltz called “A Thousand and One Nights,” a “quick
polka” called “Tick-Tock” used as background for “B”-roll of the Vienna Clock
Museum (having seen the large community clock that was installed in the late
1600’s in a big tower and remained until the 1850’s, when the tower itself,
like the one in Pisa, started leaning and leaving the clock inside was no longer
safe, the weird clock that figures so prominently in Josef von Sternberg’s The
Blue Angel doesn’t seem so weird anymore),
and of course the nominal “encore” of “On the Beautiful Blue Danube” as the
next-to-last number.
I was amused when they got to the “Blue Danube” and
Dudamel made hash of the famous introduction, “The Vienna Philharmonic wishes
you a … ” pause to allow the audience to join in … “Prosit Neujahr!,” which
means “Happy New Year!” It was obvious that, whatever languages he has besides
English and his native Spanish (he’s a native of Venezuela and the world’s most
prominent graduate of their music education program, “El Sistema”), German
isn’t one of them and he’d learned the greeting phonetically. (Earlier there
were some clips of him rehearsing the orchestra and alternating between English
and Spanish-accented Italian.) The other pieces on the program were a polka
called “Die Nasswalderin” by Johann, Jr.’s brother Josef (whom some critics
consider the real talent of the Strauss family), another polka called “With
Pleasure” by Johann, Jr.’s other
brother Eduard (and to make things more confusing, there was a Johann Strauss
III, but he wasn’t Johann, Jr.’s son — he was Eduard’s!), and two by Johann
Strauss, Sr. — an “Indian Galop”
and the traditionally mandated final piece, the “Radetzky March,” with the
audience famously clapping in unison. Charles was so impressed by the clapping
in unison he joked, “Why did the U.S. get all the white people who can’t clap?” The concert was fun, as usual, and Dudamel’s
conducting was better than average — he may not quite make the “Blue Danube” as symphonic as my favorite
conductors in the piece, Stokowski and Karajan (I’ll never forget how I was
blown away as a kid when I first heard Stokowski’s Philadelphia Orchestra 78 of
“Blue Danube” and, after previously having heard it only in pop guise, was
astonished at how beautiful and moving a piece it really is in Strauss’s
original orchestration and at his original length), but he really got into the
spirit of the piece (as other conductors who’ve tried it, including Andriss
Nelsons and Georges Prêtre, haven’t) and struck the balance of lightness and
underlying weight this music needs to work.
