New Year's Day Concert 2000 DVD

Since 1941 the first great event in the classical calendar has been the New Year's Strauss concert by the Vienna Philharmonic. The first of January, 2000 marked the end of "Strauss year", 1999 being the centenary of the death of "Waltz King" Johann Strauss and the 150th anniversary of the passing of his father, Johann Strauss. The previous May the Vienna Philharmonic gave an outdoor Johann Strauss Gala, though only The Blue Danube waltz and Radetzky March overlap with this New Year's Concert. Here the orchestra give an infectiously warm and confident performance, from... the opening Lagunen waltz to the utterly exuberant Eljen a Magjar! polka. Mixing well-loved gems with such rarities as the Albion and Hellenen polkas, this music-making is a real delight, the lavishly garlanded hall as ravishing to the eye as the music to the ear. In homage to 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Blue Danube is wittily shot as a series of graceful aerial pans across the outside of the Musikverein concert hall and over Vienna itself. Riccardo Muti, conducting his third Vienna New Year's concert thoroughly enjoys himself, and it is clear everyone else does too. On the DVD: Presented at approximately 1.7-1, the non-anamorphic picture is very good in the close-ups, but looses far too much detail in long shots. In compensation, the Dolby Digital 5.1 live sound is excellent, creating a convincing sound-stage and capturing the excitement of the performance. There are five sets of brief notes, but more impressively, two pieces, Johann Strauss' Csardas aus "Ritter Pasman" and Josef Strauss' Marien-Klange waltz can be viewed with individual ballets specially filmed in the salons of the Musikverein, performed by the Ballett der Wiener Staatsoper. The disc is not region-encoded, and will work on any PAL compatible DVD player. --Gary S. Dalkin [show more]

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