New Year’s Concert 2021 review: It has plenty of atmosphere and is not to be missed 

New Year’s Concert 2021  

Vienna Philharmonic, conducted by Riccardo Muti 

Sony Classical, out now 

Rating:

This is a bit special; a concert of great musical interest, exceptionally well played and conducted, with plenty of atmosphere, despite this being the first New Year’s Concert that has had to be performed in an empty hall.

The Italian maestro Riccardo Muti has conducted the Vienna Philharmonic 550 times over the last half-century, including five previous New Year’s Day concerts. 

Muti is 80 in July but the effervescent verve he displays here has all the charisma I so well remember from his concerts with the Philharmonia in London back in the early 1970s.

Items here like The Blue Danube and the Emperor waltzes are performed with great eloquence and power, with no automatic pilot playing in such familiar stuff. And there is fine solo work everywhere, notably from the principal cello in Franz von Suppé’s Poet And Peasant.

The orchestra gets to sing in another favourite, Josef Strauss’s polka Without A Care. Here though, despite Muti’s best endeavours, they should stick to the day job. 

Of the 15 pre-encore items, no fewer than seven hadn’t appeared at this concert before. The opener, Suppé’s Fatinitza March, is a fascinating piece, hugely popular after its premiere in 1876 – so much so that 350,000 copies of the sheet music were sold – but totally unknown now.

I had never heard it before. 

Karl Komzak’s Baden Girls waltz, has been a favourite of mine since I heard a recording many years ago by another Vienna Philharmonic maestro, Hans Knappertsbusch.

Komzak, who died in his prime falling under a moving train at Baden station, was a celebrated bandmaster, and an earthier version of the Strausses. The orchestral raspberries blown with abandon by the orchestra here will make this, for anyone who doesn’t know it, a totally joyous discovery.

A concert not to be missed.