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Drunk on waltzes and hopeful in the year 2021: Riccardo Muti called in the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra to escape the crown-related world luxury of the Vienna Music Association’s Golden Hall at the New Year’s Concert. Between the “carefree” polka and the blessed “Blue Danube” one could leave the year of the pandemic behind and rely on the comfort of tradition in unusual times. The concert was broadcast to 90 countries around the world through ORF.
“The music of the New Year’s Concert has taken us through many ups and downs,” Philharmonic President Daniel Froschauer said in a short New Year’s greeting. With this special concert they want to send a “signal of hope and optimism”. The empty hall around the noble orchestra, which is still full of flowers, was not only decoratively staged by the 14 ORF chambers led by Henning Klingen: it also symbolically illustrates the resistance of the beloved cultural rites that have taken place in recent months. They are distressed in every way.
2020 was a threat to the very existence of cultural creation around the world, and 2021 will also be different. Survival is an act of force, personal, economic and creative. But on New Year’s Day we see: an empty room that refuses to be silent. And in the sound-sculpted hands of Riccardo Muti and the Philharmonic Orchestra, it becomes a vessel for appropriate, multi-layered emotions. Especially after the break, with melodies by Franz von Suppé and Karl Komzak, the bittersweet and weightless dance triumphs over the bridge of nostalgia that makes the sadness and defiant beauty of Viennese music so inseparable. In the “Kaiserwalzer”, performed exceptionally, this dance returns to the swollen chest.
“Speranza” -esperanza- the teacher wanted to give to the public, as he had previously stressed. Muti, who will turn 80 in the summer, has been collaborating with the Vienna Philharmonic for fifty years, to which the orchestra will pay tribute next season. This is the sixth time he has been on the podium at the New Year’s Concert. Like all his previous works, this one was also characterized by the graceful struggle for finishing touches, the repeated and angular refinement of the rhetorical and dynamic figures, and the proximity to Italy and its related musical language. Pieces like Strauss’s “Neue Melodien-Quadrille” with quotes from Giuseppe Verdi’s operas are no less a bow to the master himself.
He used his greetings before the Blue Danube Waltz to warn politicians and leaders around the world not to underestimate culture and not to suppress it. “Music is not entertainment. Music is a mission to improve society,” said Muti, who wished for a better year in 2021 after an “Annus Horribilis.” You could and should see that he missed the audience in the hall. Of course: as a huge exception to the Crown, this time there was no applause during the Radetzky March, which gave Muti the unique opportunity to conduct not the hall, but the orchestra.
The ballet interludes, choreographed by José Carlos Martínez and dressed by Christian Lacroix, were presented this year by the Vienna State Ballet at the Looshaus and at the Liechtenstein Garden Palace; But the concert also brought a bit to the rest of the world: because the public was not allowed into the room, the ORF started an interactive collection of applause, like so many gestures of social solidarity last year, via the Internet. Thousands of viewers from around the world sent applause in audio format, which was recorded in the room, including UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, as revealed by ORF presenter Barbara Rett.
