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Untitled Document
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A Viennese New Year |
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Composer: |
Johann Strauss I, Johann Strauss II, Josef Strauss |
Artist: |
Marilyn Hill Smith |
Conductor: |
Clemens Krauss, Georg Huber, Laurence Rosenthal, Arthur Kulling, Hans Knappertsbusch, Alfred Walter, Istvan Bogar, Michael Dittrich, Alfred Eschwe, Karl Albert Geyer, Peter Guth, Ondrej Lenard, Ernst Marzendorfer, Christian Pollack, Martin Sieghart, Johannes Wildner, Ferenc Fricsay, Wilhelm Furtwangler, Jos van Immerseel |
Ensemble: |
Budapest Clarinet Quintet, Budapest Strauss Ensemble |
Orchestra: |
Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, Slovak State Philharmonic Orchestra, Kosice, Slovak Philharmonic Orchestra, Polish State Philharmonic Orchestra, Katowice, Austrian Radio Symphony Orchestra, London National Philharmonic Orchestra , Vienna Festival Orchestra, Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra, Strauss Festival Orchestra, Schwanen Salon Orchestra, RIAS Symphony Orchestra, Anima Eterna Orchestra |
Label: |
Naxos |
Catalogue No.: |
8.554466-67 |
Format: |
CD |
Barcode: |
0636943446621 |
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Favourite Waltzes,
Polkas and Overtures
from the programmes of
the Vienna New Year Concerts 1939-1998
The association of New Year's Day with Vienna and the music of the
Strauss family is so widespread and so popular (the annual concert in the
magnificent Musikverein is regularly relayed to millions of listeners and
television viewers the world over) that many assume it to be a tradition going
back to the days of the Strausses themselves, and to have been a regular
highlight in the life of the famous Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. Not so.
Indeed it was many decades before the names of Strauss and the Vienna
Philharmonic were linked at all. Not until 1925 did the orchestra give an
all-Strauss programme, and it was only in the late '30s that the celebrated New
Year's Day connection was established by the conductor Clemens Kraus. These
concerts and their attendant publicity have done more than any other single
undertaking to familiarise the public not only with the works of Johann Strauss
the Younger – known the world over as "the Waltz King" – but with
those of his remarkable family.
The founder of the clan, musically speaking, was the formidable Johann
the First (1804-1849), whose most famous work, the Radetzky March, brings
the present collection to its rousing end. With the now little-remembered Josef
Lanner (1801-1843), Johann senior laid the foundations on which his gifted
sons, Johann II (1825-1899), Josef (1827-1870) and Eduard (1835-1916) were to
build a tradition which made Vienna the undisputed capital of European light
music for a good three-quarters of a century. In the view of most informed
critics and musicians, his gifts were exceeded by those of his sons, but his
authority in Vienna was absolute, and in his lifetime he proved a hard act to
follow, however gifted his successors.
An event of major significance for Johann the Elder took place on 24
January 1846, for it was on this day that he was granted by decree the title of
k.k. Hofball-Musikdirektor (Director of Music for the Imperial-Royal
Court Balls). This purely honorary title, specifically created for him, was to
remain within the Strauss family until 1901 when Eduard, his youngest son,
relinquished it on account of his own old age. For many years, the senior
Strauss's position in Vienna's musical life was unassailable, and with
orchestral forces exceeding 200 musicians at his command, he dominated
proceedings in the Austrian capital's major dance establishments. It was left
to his eldest son Johann II, however, to lift the music of the ballroom to the
status of high art, as suitable to the concert hall as to the dance floor.
Johann Strauss II, the most famous and enduringly successful of all
19th-century light music composers (and one of the supreme orchestrators in
musical history) was born in Vienna on 25 October 1825. Building on the
foundations laid by his father and Lanner, the younger Johann (and to a lesser
extent his aforementioned brothers) captivated not only Vienna but the whole
of Europe and America with his abundantly tuneful waltzes, polkas, quadrilles
and marches. The thrice-married "Waltz King" later turned his
attention to the composition of operetta, and completed 16 stage works (chief
among them the ever-popular Die Fledermaus and The Gypsy Baron, whose
overtures are included here) and more than 500 orchestral compositions –
including the most famous of all waltzes, The Blue Danube (1867),
without which no New Year's Concert in Vienna would be complete. When he died,
on 3 June 1899, he could hardly have dreamed that one day the Marco Polo
Strauss Edition would establish a milestone in musical history by making his
entire orchestral output available to millions of music-lovers all over the
world (and he was a man who thought big: in 1872, in Boston, Massachusetts, he
conducted an orchestra of 2,000 and a chorus of 20,000, though how they could
see him, or he them, is anybody's guess). Johann the Younger combined a
seemingly inexhaustible flow of melodic ideas with an enviable mastery of
orchestration, yet he was not immediately able to capitalise fully on the
success of his orchestral debut in October 1844, since Vienna's major centres
of entertainment had existing contracts with the elder Johann. And in January
1845, it was again Johann Strauss the Elder and his orchestra who dominated
that year's carnival festivities in the Austrian capital.
Not until the summer of that year was there a noticeable improvement in
the younger Johann's circumstances, when he became Bandmaster of the 2nd Vienna
Citizens Regiment and was also engaged to conduct his orchestra at soirées at
the Casino Zgernitz in Oberdöbling. But if he believed these events to be a
harbinger of better fortune, he was soon to be sorely disappointed. That autumn
he was ousted from the Casino Zgernitz by a rival conductor, and the Sperl
ballroom chose to replace him with his own father. Nor were circumstances in
the natural world kind to him. His benefit concert planned for that September
was twice postponed owing to bad weather before the elements finally disrupted
it altogether. In fact it took him around three years to establish himself on
Vienna's musical scene as a worthy successor to his father, following the
latter's death in September 1849. During the 1852 Carnival he was summoned for
the first time to conduct at the Court- and Chamber-Balls, and an article in
the Theaterzeitung, praising his talents, affirmed "It is now
certain that Strauss the Father has been fully replaced by Strauss the
Son." But what about Strauss the brother (indeed both of them)? Eduard and
Josef, though they played an important part in Vienna's musical life, were now
fated, nevertheless, to work in the shadow of their more illustrious elder
sibling, although a number of authoritative commentators have suggested that in
sheer talent, if not in accomplishment, they were his equals. It was left to
the traditional New Year's Day concert, however, to give them the widespread
recognition they fully deserved, and now Marco Polo have honoured Josef, like
his brother Johann, with a series of recordings devoted to enshrining for
posterity his complete orchestral works.
Jeremy Siepmann
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