2021 Vienna Philharmonic New Year's Concert (Vienna Philharmonic, ORF, PBS, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Charles and I watched the annual telecast of at least part of the Vienna Philharmonic’s New Year’s concert, which in deference to the iron demands of our Viral Dictator took place in the usual location – the Musikverein concert hall in Vienna, where the Philharmonic plays most of its concerts (when it’s not also functioning as the Vienna State Opera Orchestra – bureaucratically those are two separate entities but they are in fact exactly the same people) – but without an audience in the hall. John Culshaw, the great record producer who made some first-rate recordings in Vienna, said the Musikverein was “a great concert hall but a disappointing recording studio,” and it’s possible the absence of an audience degraded the sound, though since I’m using a TV and don’t have a functioning separate stereo through which to route the sound I couldn’t tell any difference. What was different was the eerie silence between the selections; not only was there no one to applaud, but in the traditional closing number, Johann Strauss, Sr.’s “Radetzky March,” there was no one there to clap in unison during the final chorus. (One year Charles was impressed by the technically perfect unison beat among the audience members doing that and joked, “How come we got all the white people who can’t clap?”) As usual, the U.S. version of this concert contains only the second half of the program – arkivmusic.com’s listing for the CD (which though the concert just took place is already being offered for sale as an advance order – obviously the real reason this concert was allowed to take place even during the pandemic was it’s become such an important cash cow to keep the Vienna Philharmonic in business!) has six additional numbers in the front of the program while it omits the final three selections that were on the telecast.

The show was hosted by Downton Abbey actor Hugh Bonneville remotely from the castle of the Goodwood estate in Britain, and a lot of time that could have been used to show us more of the concert as well as Vienna itself (ORF, the official Austrian public channel, shoots a whole lot of silent B-roll that networks and stations in other countries can dub narrations into to show some of the Viennese tourist attractions) instead was used to trundle around the estate Bonneville was borrowing for his hosting duties. There were also numbers in the concert that featured members of the Vienna State Ballet dancing in some of the other historical buildings in Vienna, including so many royal palaces I had trouble keeping track of them all, and I’ve often wondered how they incorporate these into the program. My guess is the music is piped in over loudspeakers so the dancers can hear it, but the footage is shot silent and synched to the main concert sound from the Musikverein – though there aren’t diamond screens in the Musikverein to allow the audience (when there is one) to see the dancers in real time. They just get to hear the music, and that’s all. As I mentioned above, there were six pieces played in the first half of the program which we didn’t get to see or hear (thanks at least in part to PBS’s demented decision to slot only an hour and a half for this program even though the Great Performances shows of which it is nominally a part are usualliy time-slotted for at least two hours, longer if they’re doing an opera).

The part we did get started out with Franz von Suppé’s Poet and Peasant overture (Suppé has suffered the indignity of having his overtures survive in the repertory while the operettas they were overtures to have long since been forgotten) and I was surprised by the slow, quiet lyricism of the opening section (with some quite nice solo playing by the Vienna Philharmonic’s principal cellist) before Suppé went off to the races and got fast, loud and fun. (I believe this sort of overture writing began with Gioachino Rossini, who built his overtures to get louder and louder as they progressed, which earned him the nickname “Signor Crescendo.”) The next selection was called “The Girls of Baden-Baden” – Baden-Baden was a famous town including hot springs that was a favorite vacation spot for more affluent residents of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (which was still a going concern when virtually all the music on these concerts was written) and we got treated to a lot of that B-roll featuring buildings labeled “Frauenbad” (“Women’s Baths”). The piece was by Karl Komzák (though his name was also spelled in the Hungarian manner as “Karol”), and though I’d never heard of him before he’s well known enough that there’s a street sign honoring him and the piece was genuinely charming and fit in well with the overall contents of the program.

After that, though, the program was all by Strausses: one piece (“Margherita,” subtitled “French Polka”) by Josef Strauss (Johann Strauss, Jr.’s brother and according to some musicologists a more advanced composer who relied more on unusual harmonies than Big Tunes), two pieces by Johann Strauss, Sr. (“Venetian Galop” and the obligatory “Radetzky March”) and seven by the most famous member of the clan, Johann Strauss, Jr. (Strauss, Sr. had a third son, Eduard, who also composed, though he’s generally considered the least interesting musically of the three brothers; and there was a Johann Strauss III, but he wasn’t Johann, Jr.’s son; he was Eduard’s son and therefore Johann, Jr.’s nephew.) The program was divided between Strauss, Jr.’s Greatest Hits (“Voices of Spring,” “The Emperor Waltz” – which, according to Bonneville’s commentary, was originally called “Hand in Hand” and intended to celebrate a state visit by German Kaiser Wilhelm II to Vienna to meet with Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Josef, but was later renamed more generically so it could refer to just about any monarch) and the obligatory “Blue Danube” – and some more unusual selections. One was called “In Krapfen’s Woods” and was named after Franz Josef Krapf, proprietor of a popular resort far enough away from Vienna city central that you could hear birds – reproduced in Strauss’s score by both wooden and metal bird whistles.

One was called “New Melodies Quadrille” and was based on themes from popular Italian operas like Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor and Daughter of the Regiment and Verdi’s La Traviata. Those were the sources Bonneville mentioned in his commentary, though I spotted a theme from another Verdi opera he hadn’t mentioned: “Questa o quella,” the Duke of Mantua’s opening aria from Rigoletto in which he declares that to him women are all the same (the title means “this one or that one”) and he doesn’t care who he has sex with along as she’s alive, human and female. (One Fanfare reviewer was amused when he got an album that typo’ed that title as “Questo o quella,” putting the first word in its masculine form and therefore being more appropriate for the central character in another Verdi opera, Un Ballo in Maschera, the real-life Bisexual King Gustav of Sweden.) The other Johann Strauss, Jr. numbers performed were a couple of polkas, “Tempestuous in Love and Dance” and “Furioso” (the program showed the original sheet music for the latter, a spectacular engraving of what appeared to be a dance being crashed by devils), “Furioso” being the piece conductor Riccardo Muti picked as his choice before the two big obligatory “encores.”

I’m old enough to remember the 1970’s, when Muti emerged from Italy as a young firebrand of the podium; here he looked like a middle-aged businessman going about his work dutifully and effectively but without much spark or fire. He’s conducted the Vienna Philharmonic over 500 times and led the New Year’s concert five times before – in 1993, 1997, 2000, 2004 and 2018. I’ve heard other people bring more imagination and drive to this music (notably Gustavo Dudamel) and also more imaginative programming (sometimes featuring light music from composers who weren’t German or Austrian – one year I was gratified to hear the overture to German expat turned French composer Jacques Offenbach’s operetta Rheinnixen – yes, Offenbach wrote an opera about the Rhinemaidens before Wagner did, just as French composer Ernest Reyer wrote an opera about Siegfried, Sigurd, before Wagner did!), but Muti clearly had the measure of the Vienna Philharmonic (an orchestra that’s notorious as a conductor-killer) and the results were pleasant and infectious. Alas, even though this concert continued on despite the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, the spectre of disease in general and catastrophic disease in particular couldn’t help but rear its ugly head. Not only was there no clapping audience in the “Radetzky March” (a brief shot of people watching the concert in real time on a Zoom page made me hope there would at least be virtual clapping during the “Radetzky March,” like the virtual-audience applause after the big speeches at the 2020 Democratic National Convention, but there was no clapping at all), but before the march Bonneville said that Johann Strauss, Sr. had been the victim of a major epidemic himself; he’d been scheduled to conduct the “Radetzky March” at a big event at the Viennese court but didn’t show up, and it turned out the reason was he’d been stricken with scarlet fever and died from it three days later.

Muti also eschewed the famous false start of the “Blue Danube” – usually the orchestra stops playing a few measures in, the conductor says “The Vienna Philharmonic wants to wish you” in German, and the orchestra chants en masse “Prosit Neujahr!,” which as you’ve probably guessed means “Happy New Year” in German. This year Muti didn’t do the false start and instead just had the orchestra wish us all a “Prosit Neujahr!” before he started the piece, and he did a businesslike rendition that did justice to the piece without quite achieving the poetry of the greatest versions (in my not so humble opinion by Stokowski, Ormandy and Karajan; it’s Karajan’s that’s used in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey). In fact “businesslike” is the adjective I keep coming up with to describe Muti’s conducting: he got the job done and let the music work its magic but without bringing much of his own personal spark. Still, the Vienna Philharmonic New Year’s concert is reliable entertainment and something I make a point of watching every New Year’s – though since the Vienna Philharmonic and Sony-BMG, their record company, have become so fiercely possessive of it as intellectual property it’s been impossible to get downloads of the entire concert online as I used to be able to do so Charles and I could see it all.