With its conductor emeritus leading the way, the L.A. Phil puts its spin on the traditional Vienna New Year's concert — bubbly in more ways than one.
New Year’s Day symphonic programs are common around the world, but the really big show happens in Vienna. Televised in one form or another to more than 90 countries, with audio and video recordings of the concert faithfully issued every year, Vienna’s New Year’s concert continues to spin variations around the same core: music from the Strauss dynasty, played by an orchestra that has the style in its bones, the Vienna Philharmonic.
Obviously, there were differences. The futuristic Walt Disney Concert Hall cannot be transformed into Vienna’s gilded Musikvereinssaal, although they tried with a similar flower arrangement on the stage rim. Nevertheless, Disney has its own acoustical advantages, giving razor-sharp definition to familiar details.
Always working from memory, Mehta paced the transitions in the Overture to Strauss’ “The Gypsy Baron” masterfully, getting the orchestra to execute a perfect acceleration into the piece’s main body. The micro-fluctuations in tempo gave the delicate Strauss “Annen-Polka” life, and the fast Strauss polkas “Tritsch-Tratsch” and “Thunder And Lightning” were not rushed yet had plenty of dash, with the trombones doing standing comic turns in the latter.
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