20th Anniversary - Vienna Art Orchestra

Advantages: Great sampler, excellent recording.
Disadvantages: Not quite as memorable as being there in person.

...conducted the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, and 2001 marked Mikolaus Harnoncourt's début at the conductors podium, although he has previously played the 'Cello in the VPO in previous New Year's Concerts. Whilst the Radetzkymarsch is always played, and indeed a New Year's Concert without the Radetzkymarsch would be like leaving "Jerusalem" or "Land of Hope and Glory" out of the running order of the Last Night of the Proms, this CD features a lot of slightly less known music. There is as ever a large proportion of Strauß in the performance, with Johann Strauß I's Radetzkymarsch opening the CD, and a different arrangement of it on a Bonus CD. To celebrate the bicentenary of Joseph Lanner, the programme also contains his "Die Schönbrunner", "Jägers Lust" and "Steyrische Tänze", which are typical of the Waltzing tradition that Lanner and Johann... Read review

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Advantages: Witty lyrics, sparkling music
Disadvantages: None

...Die Fledermaus: The Bat Composer: Johann Strauss ll Lyrics: Carl Haffner and Richard Genee Conductor: John Owen Edwards Orchestra: D'Oyly Carte Opera Orchestra Performer: D'Oyly Carte Opera Chorus Label: Sony Classics Released: October 1, 1995 Number of Discs: 2 Cost: £27.99 The Composer Johann Strauss ll was born in Vienna on 25th October 1825 the eldest son of Johann Strauss a renowned violinist and composer. Johann Strauss junior was also a violinist. In 1844, he gathered together his own orchestra with himself as conductor and composer. Working in opposition to his father who disapproved. In 1849 on the death of his father, the two Strauss orchestras were combined. Strauss is best known for his Waltzes including The Beautiful Blue Danube. He also composed 17 operettas including Die Fledermaus in 1874. The Opera: A Musical... Read review

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Advantages: Great music is always an advantage...
Disadvantages: Great music don't have it

...devotion to the debatable one "cultural politics" of the then U.R.S.S., it is Shostakovic which, for his same admission, owes a lot to Mahler. The Fourth Symphony of the Russian would not be thinkable before without the Fourth or the Bohemian's Fifth, with that sense "panic" and at the same time "magic" of the nature that permeates and it unites so the three Symphonies. In the title I told from Vienna to Venice (implicitly remembering "You death in Venice " in the cinema version, in which the Adagietto of the Fifth Symphony of Mahler is used), but I could also have been telling for the century of the romanticism that of the more disenchanted and, together, deperate vision of the life that has been the whole century that we have been having for little time greeted . But enough, to the others the space otherwise I end up writing of everybody... Read review

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