![]() I first started watching the Vienna New Year’s concerts in the 1980’s when the U.S. The New Year’s concerts have been going ever since and have become a major cash cow for the Vienna Philharmonic, which not only telecasts them live throughout Austria and much of Europe but makes them available to other countries as well. I’m listening to this now because I’m preparing to write about last night’s PBS telecast of the 2023 Vienna Philharmonic New Year’s concert, a tradition started by Clemens Krauss in 1939 because he figured that with Vienna having been occupied, along with the rest of Austria, by Nazi Germany, the people of the city needed an “upper” to lift their spirits and prepare themselves for their new future as part of Hitler’s Reich. The disc moves on to versions conducted by “name” musicians Felix Weingartner, Erich Kleiber, Clemens Krauss – along with choral versions by something called the “Lehrer-Gesangverein Berlin-Neuköln,” a Japanese women’s chorus with soprano Shigo Yano, and some at least marginally more famous singers – Frieda Hempel, Maria Ivogün, Selma Kurz, Erna Sack – a dazzling two-piano version by Josef Lhevinne and his wife Rosina, as well as pop versions by John Philip Sousa’s band (though, like most of the “Sousa” records, it was made by his musicians but not actually conducted by him), Victor Young and Barnabas von Géczy. Right now I’m listening to one of the most oddly premised CD boxed sets in history: The Johann Strauss Collection, an eight-CD release from the Japanese Opus Kura label which I acquired about a decade ago and whose first CD contains no fewer than 13 versions of “On the Beautiful Blue Danube” (“An der schönen blauen Donau,” to give it its official title in German), starting with the one conducted by Johann Strauss III (which, despite his name, was not the son of Johann Strauss, Jr., who wrote the piece, but ratner was Strauss, Jr.’s nephew, the son of his brother Eduard Strauss).
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