Conductor Nelsons Shines in Vienna New Year’s Concert

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Right now I’m listening to a download of the complete Vienna Philharmonic New Year’s concert, of which Charles and I watched a cut-down digest version on KPBS on New Year’s night. The Vienna Philharmonic New Year’s concerts were performed sporadically since the orchestra was founded in the 1830’s but the tradition we know today was actually launched by conductor Clemens Krauss and Nazi Gauleiter Baldur von Schirach, who had been put in charge of Austria following the Nazi takeover in 1938, at the end of 1939.

The first concert was a war-relief benefit and also a pleasant diversion from the war news for the Viennese audience. Krauss decided to focus the concert on the music of the Strauss family: founder Johann Strauss, Sr. (whose “Radetzky March,” written as a parade-ground piece for the army of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, always closes the concert); his three composing children, Johann, Jr. (by far the most famous of them, with hits like the “Blue Danube,” “Tales from the Vienna Woods,” “Artist’s Life,” et al.), Josef (whom some critics have considered the most talented of the Strausses, but who died young) and Eduard. To confuse things, there was a Johann Strauss III, but he wasn’t Johann, Jr.’s son; he was Eduard’s — and to make things even more confusing, Richard Strauss, who was no relation to the Viennese Strausses (and was German, not Austrian), ripped off one of Josef Strauss’s pieces, the “Dynamism: Mysterious Powers of Magnetism” waltz (performed in the 2020 concert), for the waltz theme in Act II of his opera Der Rosenkavalier.

What we got in the U.S. was only the second half of the concert, beginning with the first post-intermission selection, Franz von Suppé’s Light Cavalry overture — and in addition to leaving out the six selections performed in the first half, PBS left out one piece from the second half, Josef Hellmesberger, Jr.’s “Gavotte.” From previous years’ downloads (including one in which we got the entire feed from Austria’s TV network, ORF, including all their B-roll) we knew that ORF, which officially co-produces the show with the Vienna Philharmonic and Sony (whose record label has the Vienna Philharmonic’s current recording contract), sends out a whole mass of footage which, in the day or so between the concert and the airing on New Year’s night, can edit it pretty much the way they choose.

In the U.S. the New Year’s concert is kept to a 90-minute time slot (even though episodes of the Great Performances series, the rubric under which the PBS showing occurs, usually runs two hours and sometimes even longer) and the musical selections are sandwiched in between long segments showing the sights (not so much the sounds) of Vienna, drawn from all that B-roll ORF supplies. This year the big features were the Sacher Hotel, where the famous Viennese Sacher Torte dessert originated, and the castle of Heiligenstadt, where Ludwig van Beethoven was staying in 1802 when he realized he was growing deaf and wrote a famously self-pitying letter to his cousin that became known as the “Heiligenstadt Testament” — he didn’t send it but it was preserved among his papers and just about everyone who’s written a biography of Beethoven has quoted it.

The reference to Beethoven was occasioned by the appearance of a Beethoven work in the concert program; usually the Vienna Philharmonic New Year’s concert doesn’t go near anyone as “heavy” as Beethoven, but at one point in his career he wrote a cycle of light pieces called “12 Contretänze” and the orchestra pressed them (or at least four of them) into service for one of the concert segments done with the Vienna State Ballet dancing somewhere off-site while the orchestra plays in the Musikvereinsaal (which simply means “Music Union Hall”) where the concert takes place. (I don’t know if these segments are pre-recorded and pre-filmed or the dancers dance live to the music piped in remotely from the live concert, though the former seems more likely.)

The inclusion of a work by Beethoven was apparently “keyed” to this year being the 250^th anniversary of his birth, which has already brought attention from the record companies: Naxos has issued a boxed set purporting to be all Beethoven’s surviving music and Pristine is planning a reissue of the substantially complete cycle of his string quartets (12 out of the 16) recorded by the Lener Quartet in 1926-27 as part of the cycle of recordings British Columbia issued as a commemoration of the centennial of Beethoven’s death in 1827.

Overall, this was one of the better Vienna Philharmonic New Year’s concerts I’ve heard —despite the typically annoying PBS presentation, including an on-air host. When PBS started broadcasting these things in the 1980’s (or at least that’s when they first crossed my path) Walter Cronkite was the host, and as he went on and on and on about how this or that aspect of the concert was “traditional” I wondered how anyone — the conductor, musicians or audience — could have any fun or experience any spontaneity in an event so hide-bound by inviolate “tradition.” When Cronkite retired his place was taken by Julie Andrews, a wonderful woman and a fine actress but someone whose only connection to Austria was having starred in the film The Sound of Music, which took place there (but in Salzburg, not Vienna).

Since Andrews stepped down the host has been British actor Hugh Bonneville, who in this country is best known for having starred as Robert Crawley, Earl of Grantham, in the BBC-TV series Downton Abbey — a show I’ll have to admit I’ve never watched — and he’s an O.K. host for this, imposing but still with a hint of an ability to have fun, but though I applaud him for pronouncing the “t” sound in the word “often,” he’s really not that scintillating a personality and I would be fine with no host at all — just chyrons to tell us what the orchestra is playing, who wrote it and when it was written.

Still, I loved the music-making in Vienna this year better than I have in a lot of previous years, and I think the main reason is the formidable conducting of Andriss Nelsons. I must admit that when I saw his name as the conductor of this year’s concert I did a bit of a double-take — “Isn’t he dead?” I thought — but I had mistaken his name for the similar one of Mariss Jansons, a major conductor who did die last year. Nelsons played the music by the Strauss boys and the other light composers represented — Carl Michael Ziehrer, Franz von Suppé, Joseph Hellmesberger (who in his “serious” works sounds so much like Brahms that a Fanfare reviewer once wrote that if you love Brahms’ symphonies but regret that there are only four of them, Hellmesberger is your man), and Hans Christian Lumbye (often referred to as “the Johann Strauss of Denmark”) — with appropriate verve and a sense of fun but also with an underlying seriousness, essentially saying to both orchestra and audience, “I love this music so much I’m not going to patronize or ‘play down’ to it.”

Nelsons’ performances were absolutely wonderful, turning the extended waltzes of Johann II and Josef Strauss (not only the familiar “Blue Danube,” which gains so much from hearing the extended slow introduction instead of just the Big Tune, but lesser known works like Johann’s “Be Embraced, You Millions” and “Enjoy Life” — written for the opening of the Musikvereinsaal, where the concert takes place — and Josef’s “Dynamism: Mysterious Powers of Magnetism,” actually written as a sort of ode to hypnotism) into great, broad, moving pieces of music that are — as my husband Charles once said about a compilation I played him years ago of various artists playing the bossa nova songs of Antonio Carlos Jobim — “light but not trivial.”

Though there were a few mistakes (including one quite obvious “clam” from one of the trumpeters on the “Blue Danube” — well, give the folks in the orchestra a break: it’s a long night), for the most part Nelsons got great playing from this sometimes tricky and prima donna-ish orchestra that made this concert a joy to sit through. I only wish the camerawork had focused more on the orchestras, its players and the audience (and to my surprise there were a lot of empty seats on the Musikvereinsaal floor; I had expected this would be one of Vienna’s hottest tickets!) and less on the chandeliers, the wall paintings and the furniture and bric-a-brac in the various rooms of the building. Andriss Nelsons certainly knows his way around this music and I look forward to hearing more from him, especially since among his other international gigs he’s also the principal conductor of one of America’s great orchestras, the Boston Symphony.