Vienna Philharmonic New Year's Concert 2024/2025 (Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, ORF, Sony, PBS, aired January 1, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, January 1) at 8 my husband Charles and I watched the annual Vienna Philharmonic New Year’s concert, which began in 1939 when conductor Clemens Krauss decided the Austrians needed a feel-good event to get over their takeover by the Nazis. So he started this tradition which mostly featured the music of the Strauss family: father Johann I, sons Johann II, Josef and Eduard; and Johann Strauss III, who was not Johann II’s son but Eduard’s! The event has become an annual tradition and a major cash cow for the Vienna Philharmonic. It’s televised by the state-owned Austrian broadcasting company ORF (short for Österreicher Rundfunk), which sends videos around the world to various countries that consist of the complete concert plus an ample supply of B-roll which can be edited by TV networks and stations any way they like. The American rights are held by PBS, which almost always shows only the second half of the concert. They also use a narrator – originally Walter Cronkite, then Julie Andrews (who had at least a faint connection with Austria since her best-known movie, The Sound of Music, takes place there – but in Salzburg, Mozart’s birthplace, rather than Vienna), and now Hugh Bonneville. Hugh Bonneville is a heavy-set middle-aged British actor whose main claim to fame is as the lead on the long-running British TV series Downton Abbey, though at least he pronounces the “t” in “often” (a long-running in-joke between Charles and I). This year’s conductor was Riccardo Muti, whom I’m old enough to remember when he was a hot young 20-something firebrand on the podium; today, in his seventh appearance leading the New Year’s concert, he’s considerably older and nowhere near as sexy, though that’s true of all of us as well. He conducted in a businesslike manner, effective and efficient but not sparkling.

The concert – or at least the part of it we Americans got to see – began with Johann Strauss, II’s overture to his operetta The Gypsy Baron, whose Wikipedia page describes it as “[t]he story of the marriage of a landowner (returned from exile) and a gypsy girl who is revealed as the daughter of a Turkish pasha, and the rightful owner of a hidden treasure. [It] involves a fortune-telling Romany queen, a self-important mayor, a rascally commissioner, a military governor, a band of gypsies and a troop of hussars.” (In other words, it’s a few more chips from the operetta log, though music critics have suggested that Strauss’s music for The Gypsy Baron was edging past operetta and towards the greater sophistication of opera.) The next selection was also by Johann II (he’s by far the most famous of the Strausses and the composer of “On the Beautiful Blue Danube” and the other Strauss works you’re likely to have heard of): the “Accelerations Waltz,” composed in 1860 for the Engineering Students’ Ball at the Vienna Sofiensaal (a legendary hall that was used for countless major recordings in the 1960’s and 1970’s, including the first complete studio recording of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, until it burned down in 2001 and was rebuilt in 2013). The third piece was the first by a non-Strauss composer: Joseph Hellmesberger, Jr. (apparently the Strausses weren’t the only ones who kept it in the family; not only did he follow in his father’s footsteps as a musician but he became the director of the Vienna Conservatory and a string quartet on his dad’s retirement) whose official German title is Fidele Bruder March but was announced last night as “Merry Brothers’ March.” (My understanding was that “Fidele” meant “faithful,” not “merry,” but we’ll let that stand.)

Afterwards Muti and the Vienna Philharmonic played the Ferdinandus Waltz, composed by Constanze Geiger, one of the many women composers who have been dredged up from obscurity to satisfy the demands of orchestra leaders these days for more “politically correct” programming. Quite a few female composers have been brought into the light, including not only relatives of famous men (like Robert Schumann’s wife Clara and Felix Mendelssohn’s sister Fanny) but people like Louise Farrenc and Mel (short for Melanie) Bonis as well as Florence Price, an African-American woman who faced the double whammy of being female and being Black. Geiger married Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg und Gotha, though it was a “morganatic marriage” – meaning that she would get a noble title out of it but their kids wouldn’t. This march is a perfectly respectable piece of light music that fit in well with the overall program. The next few pieces were lesser-known works by the Strausses: Johann II’s “Either/Or Polka,” Josef’s “Transaction Waltz,” and Johann II’s “Annen Polka” and “Chit-Chat Polka.” After that came one of the big pieces: Johann II’s “Wine, Woman and Song” (though we could see on one of the musicians’ music stand the original German title, “Wein, Weib und Gesänge,” which struck me as odd because “Weib” means “wife,” not “woman” – the usual German word for “woman” is “Frau,” though even that usually means a married woman and an unmarried woman is a “Fräulein”). As he pretty much did through the entire concert, Muti conducted pretty much on autopilot, pacing the orchestra through well-judged tempi but not bringing much imagination or flair to the music.

“Wine, Woman and Song” brought the “official” part of the program to an end, but there followed the three obligatory “encores” (the word is in quotes because there’s really no question as to whether or not they’re going to happen). One is of a piece of the conductor’s own choice (and oh, how I wish someday a sufficiently subversive conductor would demand that the orchestra play Ravel’s “La Valse,” his destruction of the Viennese waltz tradition composed during World War I, in which Austria and France were on opposite sides) and the other two are Johann II’s “The Blue Danube” and Johann I’s “Radetzky March.” This time the conductor’s own choice was another work by Johann II: “The Bayadere (Quick Polka)” from a Strauss operetta with the engaging and intriguing title Indigo and the Forty Thieves (based on the Arabian Nights tale Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, with a German libretto by Maximilian Steiner, premiered in Vienna in 1871). Muti introduced a new wrinkle into the traditional performance of “Blue Danube”: the conductor is supposed to play the first few bars, then stop and say, in German, “The Vienna Philharmonic wants to wish you a … ”, and then the orchestra chants in unison, “Happy New Year!” This time Muti did the greeting both in German and his own native language, Italian. What follows was a typical latter-day Muti performance: well played and decently paced but lacking the final bursts of energy that mark the difference between a good performance and a great one. (My all-time favorite “Blue Danube” performances are by Stokowski, Ormandy and Karajan.)

The final “Radetzky March,” written by Johann I to celebrate a particularly significant victory for Austria over Italy in the Battle of Custoza (1848), was added to the Vienna Philharmonic New Year’s concerts in 1946 by conductor Josef Krips, and in 2019 the Vienna Philharmonic commissioned a new orchestral arrangement to replace the original by Leopold Weininger, who’d written his during the Nazi era and therefore it was considered “tainted.” Overall this was a good if not great New Year’s concert, and I was amused that like some other conductors Muti turned away from the orchestra and towards the audience in the “Radetzky March,” as if he were compelled to conduct them. Midway through he turned away from both orchestra and audience, and towards the dancers in the big ballet numbers. If nothing else, this telecast answered a question I’d long had about these productions: were the dancers filmed “live,” in real time,to pre-recorded music piped in to the off-stage venues where they perform; or were they recorded and filmed earlier? This show made it clear that they’re dancing to pre-recorded music; that became clear when one of the dancers disappeared from one venue and reappeared in another much quicker than she could have got there by herself. It also featured an incredibly attractive Black male dancer whom I had the hots for almost as soon as he walked on and I could see what he was packing between his legs. In fact, the first number that included dancers featured four hunky guys and four slender but well-muscled women, and there were a couple of brief, blessed moments in which two of the male dancers hugged each other and did some kisses and joint steps on the dance floor. All in all, this Vienna Philharmonic New Year’s concert was acceptably entertaining but lacked the spark this venerable event can have – and oddly, for something I’d assumed would be one of the hottest tickets in Vienna, the shots of the audience sure included a surprising number of empty seats.