The Vienna New Year concert: a divine performance

CANBERRA—While Filipinos celebrated New Year’s Eve with a barrage of firecrackers and other noisemakers, ostensibly to drive away the demons of the old year, people in over 90 other countries worldwide watched the most widely broadcast musical event of the past 75 years: the New Year concert of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra at the Golden Hall of the Musikverein.

This unique cultural event was aired live and seen by 50 million TV viewers around the globe. I have often wondered why Philippine TV networks have not tuned us to this end-of-the-year event, despite our reputation as a nation of music lovers.

We have a long tradition in concert music. Established in 1926 by the Viennese conductor Alexander Lippay, the Manila Symphony Orchestra is one of the oldest in Asia, and in its first post-Liberation concert in Manila in May 1945, it resumed presenting concerts featuring traditional Viennese waltzes, highlighting works of the Strauss family. Thus, Filipinos had their first exposure to “The Blue Danube Waltz” by Johann Strauss Jr. at the Metropolitan Theatre, even before the start of the Philippine independence movement and ahead of the election of the first Philippine legislature in 1907.

The 2016 Vienna Concert took place under the baton of a non-Austrian conductor, Mariss Jansons, and represented the 75th anniversary of this unique cultural event. It was broadcast here in Canberra by the SBS (Special Broadcasting Station) as a public service. The concert was held in the awe-inspiring Musikverein, venue of the cultural events in Vienna, which is known to music lovers all over the word as the City of Dreams and once the seat of the Austro-Hungarian Habsburg empire that ruled Central Europe for centuries up to the end of World War I on Nov. 11, 1918.

The selection of the conductor of the New Year concert involves an extremely careful and tedious process, as the Vienna Philharmonic is expected to recapture the glory and grandeur of the Habsburg dynasty at the zenith of its imperial power by the River Danube. Maestro Jansons was born in Latvia, in the Baltic states, which were not part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. He grew up in the Soviet Union as the son of conductor Arvids Jansons. He studied violin, viola and piano and graduated with honors from the Leningrad Conservatory with a degree in conducting studies in Vienna with Hans Swarowsky, and in Salzburg with Herbert von Karajan.

In 1971, Jansons emerged a prize winner from the conducting competition of the Herbert von Karajan Foundation in Berlin. His collaboration with the Vienna Philharmonic goes back to 1992. He conducted the New Year 2016 concert for the third time (the first two times were in 2006 and 2012).

On the podium, Jansons directed the Vienna Philharmonic with authority and in complete control of one of the best orchestras in the world, including the Berlin Philharmonic. He and the orchestra members picked each of the 18 pieces from an original list of 800; they played compositions by Robert Stolz, Johann Strauss, Carl Michael Ziehrer, Eduard Strauss, Josef Strauss, Emile Waldteufel, Josef Hellmesberger sn., and Johann Strauss, sn. One of the major pieces was “The Blue Danube Waltz,” and following tradition, it ended with the “Radetsky March,” as the audience gave the orchestra a standing ovation, clapping in unison to the beat of the conductor.

In a report of the orchestra’s final rehearsal, BBC described the hard work that went into “what is the world’s Most-watched classical music event of the year.” According to BBC correspondent George John, Maestro Jansons took issue, during the rehearsal, with the issue that “light” music is light work.

According to the report, Vienna Philharmonic chair and violinist Andreas Grossbauer said ahead of the event: “It’s very, very difficult. Take, for instance, ‘The Blue Danube Waltz.’ To create the beautiful phrases here, these are really difficult things.” The report stated further: The effort that goes into each concert is “as well-hidden to the more than 50 million people tuning in as the dark origins of the event,” which was originally “a morale booster staged by the Nazis to draw attention away from a losing war (World War II).”

The final arrangements were spectacular, as TV audiences were treated to ballet and stunning Vienna vistas, and the gilded Musikverein concert hall is the perfect venue for a slickly staged experience that can cost more than $1,000 for those lucky enough to get a ticket.

For three hours during the rehearsal, musicians clad in jeans and T-shirts repeatedly went over the passages. Jansons was firm as he cajoled them “to do it just a little better each time—more piano here, a smoother passage elsewhere.”

“It’s not easy when you take it seriously and want to conduct a very high-class concert… You must have a very special relationship with this music,” he said.

In his third New Year concert appearance, Jansons appeared less concerned with falling into routine and more concerned with blending the tradition of Strauss performances with an interpretation of his own. “An element of intuition is very important,” he said. He spoke of “moving feelings and unique moments experienced by the orchestra during the performances.” With him at the podium, performances “are not shows but deep emotion.”

When asked who his favorite New Year conductor is, Jansons demurred. “How can you compare?” he said with a laugh, evoking the difficulty of an oenophile picking a fine red wine. “Do you prefer Bordeaux or Burgundy?”