Lights and shadows of New Year’s Concert – The Nation (Argentina)

The history of the show that opens the musical cycle in Vienna and is worldwide

Habits are habits. While in Argentina on New Year begins later than usual (sometimes due to an outdated with excess intake of food and alcohol) in Vienna people empilcha to go hear a concert for anything unusual. It is the most famous in the world: New Year’s Concert, featuring the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra (Das Neujahrskonzert der Wiener Philharmoniker, according to its German name) at the Musikverein, the audience for this kind of music considered (note: this It does not include rooms operas, such as the Colon Theatre) as the best acoustics in the world. Your paquetísima main hall is decorated with flowers and the public comes early willing to listen to a program that will be focused on the works of the Strauss family; those of his sons Johann and Johann, Josef and Eduard.

This has become a kind of ritual featuring the famous waltzes, marches and polkas has a history that began in 1939. The director will take musically open the baton to 2016, the Latvian Mariss Jansons, told DPA that over the years acquired “the importance of a message of peace and understanding between peoples”. The funny thing is that he was born at the beginning of World War II when when Nazism was master of Vienna. At the request of Clemens Hellsberg violinist, he began researching how functional it was the orchestra to the Nazi regime. According to several reports published online on the website of the Vienna Philharmonic, in those years at least half of the musicians were members of the Nazi party. Two of them belonged to S. S. In addition, 13 Jewish musicians were removed from the orchestra and 5 of them died in concentration camps.

Mariss Jansons.

Fortunately the orchestra then reinvented War II. Currently New Year concert was televised to over 80 countries and an estimated audience of 50 million people. With such dissemination in the last decade they began to walk down the podium stage the most important directors. A Clement Krauss, who began directing these evenings, what happened, among others, Lorin Maazel, Herbert von Karajan, Claudio Abbado, Carlos Kleiber, Riccardo Muti, Daniel Barenboim and Jansons, who, besides being elected in 2016, was also leading the orchestra in two opportunities.

Traditions

Almost like a folkloric fact, the concert also acquired and divested of certain customs over the years. On the one hand, it has definitely rejected the idea of ​​a fixed principal; on the other, it has been incorporated as standard a series of encores including the “Blue Danube” and “Radetzky March”, which the audience follows with palms at certain times that are indicated by the shift manager. And sometimes, as the orchestra knows by heart how it should sound, the directors are dedicated to making a joke that remains the surprise (not a surprise) concert.

One of the most original was Franz Welser-Möst, who devoted himself to give her stuffed animals while the musicians sounded the “Carnival of Venice”. Then he finished it running with a wooden spoon and cook hat.

In 2014, when he directed Daniel Barenboim, joined a couple who danced the “Blue Danube” in the middle of the room .

The hit is the “Radetzky March”, the audience received with palms at the end of the concert. This is the 1987, which led a veteran and Herbert von Karajan.