A Sleep-Deprived Account of the New Year's Concert

The traditional hatchet job, with my apologies for hyperacidity or inaccuracies, follows:

Yesterday morning, as is our wont, we watched the New Year's concert of the Vienna Philharmonic on television; this year it was an unusually large contingent, as Papa, Mama, Ge., J. and I were there, laughing and groaning and minding the music as the moment demanded. I had been up for some twenty hours and was as a result in a vague and grumpy frame of mind.

This year the conductor was Franz Welser-Möst, on his home heath, though rightly or wrongly I felt that his musical terrain was more Wagner than Strauss, just as with Daniel Barenboim I seem to remember that there was a hint of Beethovenishness throughout. The music encompassed not only the Strausses and Josef Hellmesberger Jr., who as the ORF commentator noted was an early conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic and is therefore honoured regularly in the programme, but also Verdi (a charming morsel of Don Carlo) and Wagner (something from Lohengrin) in honour of their impending 200th birthdays. For the Wagner the brass section melted together into an almighty unisono roar which had the subtle heft of, though more harmoniousness than, a sledgehammer. It felt in my view a little ponderous for a classical, rectangular concert hall. In terms of musical bells and whistles, grating boxes came out towards the end of the concert, there was a harp, and the triangle often came into play.

I approved considerably of the flower arrangements, at least insofar as to find them uncommonly tasteful, arranged to give an overall impression of pink rose colour. There were, as customary, roses, anthuriums, orchid-like flowers, and for a change snapdragons, nestled in greens, and though the anthuriums were anthuriums they were so pale pink and beigey-yellow that I barely noticed them, which is as it should be.

For the first half of the concert I was inattentive or out of the room, preferring even to begin translating a Greek text for a course presentation to sticking around in my grouchy mood, but then I arrived for the cinematic pièce de résistance which is the intermission tourist video — an experience much softened by the aforementioned sleepiness.
The white and yellow hunting palace which I think has popped up in the films before was the setting for an agglomeration of actors who were trussed out in period costumes, of different periods, partly in such an oddly stiff though garden-party-ish manner and particularly in such heavy white make-up that they looked like ghouls or vampires or zombies with very orderly eating habits. The emphasis seemed to be on the 18th century, so they wore wigs and beauty spots and whatever healthy equivalent of white lead we have nowadays, and the dame who was the heroine of the thing wore a bodice and a huge transparent skirt which was by some degrees more demure than Lady Gaga because the legs were engulfed. Said dame bore a startling resemblance to Sarah Jessica Parker in Sex and the City. There was some sort of narrative with the dude who was the hero, which I couldn't be bothered to follow.

As far as more obvious plot goes, the lady and gentlemen were then somehow transferred into modern-day clothing and brought to Schloss Grafenegg, then to various sites of natural beauty, as itinerant tourists.

The cinematography this year was strange; altogether the team seems to love having a bar of black which fades into the top of the screen, and to love the kind of minimalism which I can't abide; I like pictures of scenery and details to be very detailed and to have a two thirds/one third composition. (The Danube 'collage' later on similarly annoyed me. Mama remarked approvingly that a scene of a hilltop abbey/castle/etc. silhouetted in fog reminded her of Caspar David Friedrich — an artist whose work I at times dislike, so . . ..) The lighting was of a species which reminded me of commercials in which a person, freed of the fetters of an obstructed bowel by magical yoghurt or prescription meds, frolics joggingly along a grassy field in the summertime, as the television screen is suffused with a halcyon glow in which everything looks much pinker and pale bluer and greener than reality.

I suffered some belated remorse for the raking over the intermission last year or the year before that, because as far as I could tell a great deal more effort went into that.

On the positive side, Julie Andrews seemed to be there in the audience again, and I greatly approved of the choreography for the ballet scenes. On the other hand the gorge metaphorically rose in my throat when the dancers played hide-and-seek in a leafy green maze, firstly because it reminded me of tiresomely repetitive Regency novel scenes set in Vauxhall, secondly because it reminded me of America's Next Top Model's High Fashion season when Tyra Banks shot a commercial video set inside and outside an Italian palace. At the same time I thought that the element of cheekiness was good.

Besides I had just finished reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X, complete with the afterword by Alex Haley. So the next dance, besides being Havishamy because all the ballerinas were in white gowns and wedding veils at first, was uncomfortably apposite. The dances took place inside the palace where the walls and floors were white, the ballet dancers were in white, the furniture was covered in tulle, and according to Papa's ingenious surmise a white-clouded glass had been placed in front of the camera lens so that everything looked even whiter, I was a little anxious and thought of the KKK. The music also had a slightly stodgy quality about it at times which reminded me of Malcolm X's insistence that black people are freer and do have a better feeling for music than white people, and I guess also his resistance against bourgeois complacency. Still, the white walls had a bit of a buttery, creamy hint to them so I figured that as far as mental associations go, maybe someone is simply very fond of sugary chocolate.

So, as usual, I think that the aim of the intermission and the subsequent dances was to present Vienna as a romantic destination and as a wedding destination. I simply felt more comfortable about it last year when there was more diversity about it; this year the emphasis on the gratification of consumer wishes without (I thought) much intelligence or true cultivation or interest in other aspects of the city and the country, grated more on my nerves. 'Some reason,' I think, may be the lack of sleep. I did feel happy as we began to watch the dance set to Strauss's (Johann, the Younger) "Wo die Citronen blüh'n," Ge. had peeled an orange, so we saw the Viennese architecture, the summer sunshine, the dancers, the greenery before the building, and heard the music, and at the same time could sniff the citrus if we wished.