There are enough, and quite different, waltzes, polkas and other dance forms written by the Strauss family members to allow the concert to be interesting and varied. I suppose that putting together a varied programme is one of the skills of the conductor.
Karajan and C Kleiber (twice) put together varied programmes, which are not at all difficult to listen to all the way through.
Very different from Bach, obviously, but (I think) there’s room enough for both.
I felt the same day and gave up after 20 minutes or so.
Watching the event on TV with the amount of flowers in the auditorium there must be a very pleasant smell.
On the other hand those seated in the front row must have a good view of flowers and not much else!
Having sat in the front row at the RFH the music goes literally over your head. You can check if the conductor has nicely polished shoes.
Best seats if you want a relativly close acoustic are probably about 25 rows back.
The commentators on TV always used to say that the flowers were a gift from Italy (Florence or Turin, perhaps). Now they are all grown in Vienna (or Austria, perhaps).
The Golden Hall always looks spectacular. I’d just love to get there to see it for myself.
I remember sitting in the front row at the Barbican years ago with Rattle conducting, I guess the CBSO, he still had dark hair. He came on in perfect evening dress, he must have been distracted changing as a pair of trainers were quite visible at my eye level.
On the few occasions that I spoke to Simon Rattle in Islington, when we each had babies in buggies, he came across as rather scatty. No airs and graces, very polite and unassuming, but definitely scatty.
Perhaps he was just working out in his head the tempi or accents in some vast Mahler symphony, while I was wondering whether to have tea or coffee when I got home.
Less than a week after the event, the 2023 New Year’s Concert is now available in 24/96 download from HighRes Audio. Is this the soonest ever? A very interesting and varied programme I thought.
Many musicians have that. They seem to live on a different planet. My theory about it is that they have associative minds jumping in many directions.
They are usually able to get the recording of the New Year’s Day concert into the shops within a week, so 6th Jan is pretty impressive going.
One way of telling that it’s a rush job is that the CD/LP booklet lists the music played, but not the timings of the individual pieces of music. They then quietly slip out a new version of the CD/LP package a week or so later, with timings for the individual tracks shown in the booklet. (I don’t know if buyers of the initial issue can swap to a timed, corrected version of the booklet later.)
A side-effect of producing the booklet in advance is that the conductor can’t change the music, or the order of the music, on the morning of the concert - so they probably just have to hope that any vocalist or instrumental soloist doesn’t drop dead during the concert.
Yes, I can imagine that conductors develop a way of using their brains to enable them to keep all those complicated time signatures or whatever whizzing around.
(My clumsy wording here is probably not helping me pass myself off as a neurosurgeon.)
I was lucky to find this CD for £1 in a charity shop a few years ago. Abbado never did anything badly and this stab at the Strauss New Year gig is excellent. The sound quality is startlingly good too. Demo quality in fact.
London was lucky to have Abbado in charge of the LSO for so many years, even though he presided over the move to the wretched Barbican Concert Hall in the depths of what our new King will no doubt consider another ‘monstrous carbuncle’ to match the eyesore he so hates over to the West of London.
@KJC - Abbado had consistently high standards. I heard him live once at the Royal Festival Hall and was not disappointed.
Abbado’s qualities were further enhanced for me when he refused, on artistic grounds, to permit DG’s attempts to issue a “highlights” disc of the slow movements from his various Mahler symphony recordings. He had the highest standards.
I saw Claudio Abbado in London a number of times, but the concert that stands out all these years later was one that included Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto with his childhood friend Maurizio Pollini. If all music making were at that exalted level, we would be blessed indeed.
Thanks for this recommendation. I have a kind of domestic problem that my wife not always does agree to the music I’d like to listen to. I was able to stream this second piano concert on quite a high volume yesterday without issues. Nice it is.
The Brahms Second Concerto is one of my all-time favourite concertos, along with the slightly earlier Beethoven Fourth.
Emil Gilels made a few great recordings of both during his long career. You can’t go wrong with the early EMI stereo recording of the Beethoven with Leopold Ludwig and the Philharmonia or the later DGG Brahms Second with Eugen Jochum and the Berlin Philharmonic.
Maurizio Pollini is special in both. He recorded the Beethoven Fourth with Karl Bœhm in Vienna for DGG at the height of his career (better than his remake), and I have mentioned the Brahms above.
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