This year I was going to be less satirical about the Vienna Philharmonic's New Year's Concert. Maybe it is because I've grown up and finally appreciate the work that goes into the mini-films that accompany the Philharmonic's music. Or maybe it is because during a coronavirus lockdown I am desperate 1) for an event, 2) for armchair travel. But in the end I think I have relapsed to old habits.
The first glimpse of the orchestra on the stage of the Wiener Kunstverein, the hall itself vast ranks of empty benches, was a shock. Not wearing any masks, not noticeably distanced from each other, I was speculating 1) whether they'd just decided to infect each other, or 2) whether the musicians had been quarantined from the sight of family and friends or confined to a large and precarious 'bubble' like professional athletes, for the past two weeks. Their happy air hinted at a lighter regimen of corona testing instead.
[After that concert Mama was channel-surfing when we spotted another, really distanced concert. Chairs in regimented formation were dispersed across the stage and beyond the stage. A menacing army of masked singers was standing to attention and barking forth in post-apocalyptic form. A few extra singers, looking frankly like Hitchcock's birds, perched up in the loges in black gowns, standing in 3/4 profile for some reason. Everyone had a tortured expression on their faces, in service of the passion of the music perhaps or in general woe. I then felt better about the lack of masks in Vienna — from an aesthetic perspective.]
When the music began, conductor Riccardo Muti — he's said he trusts the Vienna Philharmonic to run themselves, but I suspect that the presence of an audience usually inspires him to greater efforts — looked almost bored at the podium. Then he decided to infuse showmanship here and there, hopping up and down once in a way that impressed me considering he's no longer twenty, and then apparently ducking underneath his music stand to look for cobwebs. But he seemed never to stop feeling weird when he turned away from the musicians and bowed toward an imaginary audience/a single cameraman.
Moving on from corona, I had feminist doubts about part of the way the orchestra was presented. In my view, the surface differences between the female and male musicians could barely have been emphasized more: heavy eyeshadow, the blush on one lady that you can spot from fifty yards, false eyelashes, and ostentatiously styled hair. Whereas a few men displayed heartening symptoms of a 'corona haircut' in the uneven strands draping the napes of their necks, etc. Perhaps they were permitted to concentrate on the music. If it was the women's own choice I sincerely apologize and of course television make-up is never subtle; but I could not imagine focusing on music with that much going on in my face.
The flowers were unusually prolific in the concert hall this year: roses, lilies, carnations, orchids, etc., and unfortunately the anthuriums for which I will uninventively recycle the term 'butt-ugly.' This year the anthuriums were largely pale green, floating around the flower arrangements like lily pads in a garden pond, and pale pink; the pale pink ones were worse and their artificial bubblegum shine highly suggested plumbing cleaning fluid and u-bend pipes to me. Later on, two taxidermied birds were propped in the blossoms. The second one, a nice little yellow bird, was fine; but the first, a larger concoction which looked like a parrot that had been stuffed underneath a couch cushion and had reemerged with a vague tousled stump instead of an identifiable head, was a little disconcerting.
This year there was less Strauss music than usual, I felt, with Franz von Suppé, Carl Zeller, Carl Millöcker and Klaus Komzák compositions mixed in. It had less energy in the first half of the concert, more energy in the second half; I think what also really helped is that the musicians made a little noise at the end of pieces in the second half by tapping their music stands to applaud soloists — the percussionist who handled the cuckoo box and the bird whistle, the harpist, etc. It was less incredibly creepy than the faceless applause that was streamed in from live volunteer listeners. The musicians had to stand and accept this applause at length with pained grins as they stared at the empty auditorium; it felt mechanical and to be honest rather dehumanizing.
***
During the intermission, there was of course the film that annually celebrates Austrian tourist destinations with excerpts of chamber music. This time it celebrated a centenary of the Burgenland state in Austria.
As the start year was 1921, we were led around the Burgenland landscape by a young man who wore early 20th-century motoring breeches, a jacket and goggles as he conducted a dazzlingly clean motorcar (they must have wiped down the windshield between takes to get rid of the bugs and dirt) through the leafy green forests and hilly fields.
Independently, the camera showed gleaming white plastered churches and further landscapes like fields of sunflowers that could barely have been filmed in a cheesier way.
The time setting was a little uncanny: 1921 was of course soon after World War I and I couldn't help thinking that war amputees, shell-shock and poverty would have been a more frequent sight in Austria at the time.
As part of the 'plot,' the young man (it turns out based on the official notes that he is supposed to be an American GI tasked with drawing the new borders between Austria's Burgenland and Hungarian territory according to the peace agreement) would peer through telescopes embedded in land surveyor's equipment, and make stops to photograph farms where peasantry chopped wood for kindling, etc., in traditional shirts and dirndls. This celebration of rural customs was unluckily a little reminiscent of 1920s and 30s homeland propaganda. Anyway, the young man would group together the peasants in doubtful lighting conditions, lift another period camera that must have been kindly loaned to the production crew by a museum, and then make another haphazardly composed photo.
(I might sound needlessly mean by talking about the photo composition, but one thing I've noticed about early black-and-white photography is that there was an artistic ethos to it, where the photographer always wanted the proportions to be accurate in a way that reflects traditional painting and sketching, more than photography as an independent medium. For example, I think — and, yes, this is a bit of a 'hot take' — that Ansel Adams is generally more an Expressionist painter on film than someone who took photographs as photographs. So the sloppy composition of the film's amateur photographer felt like a historical anachronism that I'm willing to be pedantic about.)
Maybe the film production had qualms of their own re. superficial echoes of Nazi propaganda. When the camera glided away to show a crew of five uniformed men trooping up a tower for a ceremony that involved swinging a large gilded white flag from the top (and no I still don't know what that was about), green boughs and red roses were thoughtfully taped to the barrels of their rifles to show that they came in peace.
Anyway, then the film paid tribute to Franz Liszt, who lived in the Burgenland. A trio of a pianist (a lady who wore a bright red gown to keep her apart from the male musicians who were clad in standard, more nondescript professional concert attire ... honestly), a cellist, and a violinist sat or stood on the green sward beside a bland pedestal with an oversized bronze bust of Liszt on top that looked it might fall over at any moment because it was so top-heavy. The music itself was a little... pounding, but that's just Liszt. Haydn's trio that was turned into the melody of the German national anthem, played by a different group of colleagues earlier in the intermission, was a little friendlier.
Then the film ended with a trio on a flat tourist boat on an empty lake, the sun setting in the background.
These landscape concerts always require me to cross my fingers, clap my hands and very strongly believe that a) the instruments are perfectly safe from harm, and b) that the acoustics are remotely like the pre-recorded ones we're hearing.
On the boat I imagine there must have been a loud flapping noise from the ship's flags, a loud roaring noise from the motor and a loud blustering noise from the wind.
Again, I stewed a bit because of my feminist convictions. The lady musician was given a powder-blue blazer that matched the colour of the boat (why?), while the gentlemen as I recall wore regular, monochrome suits. Likely I'm over-interpreting, but this arrangement where the gentleman is the visual stem and the lady is the visual flower is a gendered trope I'd expect more from an André Rieu concert where feminism is a faraway evil banished from this technicolour paradise. (Note: I do not actually have an idea of Rieu's stances on gender issues.) It's true the violinist looked fine enough with the adventure. If the women are going to look differently from how professionals in the Vienna Philharmonic usually look, though, the men should also be wearing crimson apparel or pastel blazers. If that's not going to happen, the film production crew should think why that doesn't make sense to them.
***
Later, in the second half, the dancers appeared. This year the costumes were by Christian Lacroix, acid-colored ensembles that were ruched for the larger dance, a little raunchy but still elegant, cannily adapted the 1920s aesthetic even if Lacroix himself is more 1980s. The ballet dancers cavorted in pointe shoes across closely cropped lawns and gravel paths, which made me shudder; it might be just because I do beginner's ballet but it seems like a messy and risky type of ground to dance on. This year I liked the choreography, however, and the acting.
There were two dances, of course, to illustrate different compositions on the musical programme. One was the more classic dance at the Gartenpalais Liechtenstein in Vienna. Then there was another dance in an opulent 1900s bank/department store house designed by Adolf Loos* with mirrors and wooden panelling: picture a little Edouard Manet and Auguste Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec mixed with a little Alphonse Mucha, and then you have it. The dance had influences of tango in it, the shoes had heels, and the dancers' costumes were drop-waisted and flapperish. Three women flirted with a man and two danced along with each other, and that was the plot; and one woman ended up being chosen while the other two philosophically shrugged their shoulders, and that was it. I was, for once, not offended.
* The Wikipedia article amusingly narrates that "It was said that Emperor Franz Joseph had not only avoided passing next to Looshaus for the rest of his life by using the exit at the Michaelerplatz, but also had to leave the windows of the Hofburg nailed so that he did not have to see the 'hideous' house anymore."
Many arabesques, leaps and pirouettes were performed in risky-looking places. For example, right at a glass platform with a stately carriage in the Gartenpalais. (I thought this was for the Kaiserwaltz, where aside from mustache-heavy portraits of 19th and 20th century Emperors and the burlesque red and gold furnishings of a formal room, we were also treated to opulent portraits of Empress Sissi. But since the Gartenpalais celebrates the royal family of Liechtenstein instead, I must be wrong and I'm probably thinking of images from that were screened without any dancing, later on.) Or, in the 1900s house dance, the dancers were swinging their legs right at thin white freestanding joists in a low roof, or the mirrors and gilt railings ... I almost literally had my hands glued to my cheeks like the scream emoji.
The 1900s house perils recalled the James Bond film The Living Daylights. Specifically, the scene where the American arms dealer who has an obsession with toy soldier battles has a final showdown with Bond in a roomful of glass cases and sculptures. But nobody whistled "Rule Britannia," there were no glass shards or blood spatters, and the dancers were all safe in the end.
***
While a representative of the orchestra also spoke earlier (in German and in English) to offer the music as an emblem of hope, the conductor Riccardo Muti also took the opportunity to address the heads of state who like watching the concert. He said that there was medicine for the body, but also medicine for the mind; music is medicine for the mind. He hoped that governments would recognize that culture — and I was glad that here he was speaking of all forms of music and other culture, not the Vienna Philharmonic or classical music narrowly — is a primary need. I thought it was a brave and helpful message. Then came the Prosit Neujahr! greeting, and the Blue Danube Waltz encore, as it does every year. And then the Radetzky March...
My annual modus operandi for the Radetzky March in the New Year's Concert programme is to drag a blanket or hoodie over my head, dramatically moaning in horror and anguish at this darned March, as one or two family member laugh with a startling lack of empathy.
But this time I was wondering how the concert organizers would handle the clapping that the audience usually contributes to the piece, which is the part I detest most. So I stayed unblanketed, and was rewarded because... This year there was no clapping! (Well, all right, there was clapping from two of my brothers and Mama, but not. from. me.)
At last, after seventeen years of dedicated dislike — and of course I am a misanthrope for preferring the silence of humans there — I almost liked that encore.
***
Disclaimer: I've undoubtedly mixed up many details. Official, but German-language, details of the concert are here:
"„Neujahrskonzert der Wiener Philharmoniker 2021“ live in ORF 2 und Ö1" [ORF]
"Neujahrskonzert 2021 mit Riccardo Muti" [Wiener Philharmoniker]
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