Riccardo Muti
is an expert at improvising speeches, or at least making them look like one.
After the
Polka Furioso
of
Johann Strauss Jr.,
the Neapolitan master changed the baton into the microphone, turned on his heel and looked for
the red flash of the camera to speak from the podium to the 2,000 empty seats in the
Golden Hall of the Musikverein Vienna
.
"The weapons of the musicians in this room are instruments, instruments laden with flowers," he
told the millions of viewers who did not want to miss the strangest New Year's Concert in history.
«Music is important not because it is entertainment.
More than a profession, it is a mission.
For this reason, after this horrible year, I want to send a message to the leaders of the world so that they consider culture a basic good to achieve a better society.
Then, as tradition dictates, he invited the professors of the Vienna Philharmonic to congratulate the choir on their entry into the year 2021. Never before have their voices resounded with such an echo between the walls of a Golden Hall without an audience.
The concert had started two hours earlier with
the Fatinitza march
by
Franz von Suppe
, which the musicians carried out without a mask or safety distance.
It was a way of claiming, between lines and bars, the acoustic power of the best sound factory in the world.
With the part in the middle and the locks in symmetrical fall,
Muti gave herself passionately to the opening bars of the most important symphonic matinee of her career.
When, twelve months ago, his name was announced to direct
the New Year's Concert
for the
sixth time, he
did not imagine that he would have to sweat so much to lift a program that he knows by heart.
Perhaps because, whatever happened, his intervention in the Golden Room would have to be remembered as a historical event, only comparable to the
Novena directed by Leonard Bernstein
after the fall of the Wall or the emotional tribute that
Kurt Masur
dedicated
to the victims of the New York bombings.
The unmistakably Wagnerian aroma of
Johann Strauss Jr.'s
Sound Waves
predisposed to the sublime and transcendental listening of a concert that for decades had subscribed to the
kitsch
exhibitionism
of the Strauss family's waltzes and polkas.
There were no shortage of festive passages, starting with the polkas
Niko
by Johann Jr. and
Ohne Sorgen
by his brother Josef, all a waste of optimism in the face of the uncertain future in which childhood summers in a
Pavlovsk
resort became
.
Muti not only masterfully unraveled the rhythmic mystery of the waltzes (energetic first strike, graceful prolongation and rising fall), but managed to articulate the subtext of each work in a
Dickensian
tale
that connected the mining lamps
of Carl Zeller's
Grubenlichter
waltz
with the light at the end of the tunnel and the song to life from the
Galop In Saus und Braus
dance
by Carl Millocker, the score of which contained surprising reminiscences
of Rossini's
Guillermo Tell
overture
.
Not surprisingly, the
entire program pointed indiscriminately to Italy
: from the opening passage of the Von Suppè operetta to the
Margherita
polka
by Josef Strauss, composed for the wedding of Margarita Teresa of Savoy.
At the end of the first part,
the applause of a virtual audience
was heard
, broadcast directly
from 7,000 homes around the world to the Musikverein thanks to an interactive platform specifically developed by the organizers.
After the break, during which a short documentary was shown to commemorate the centenary of the Austrian state of Burgenland, came one of the concert's highlights: the overture to the comedy
Poet and Peasant
by
Von Suppè,
in which the cellist
Tamás Varga and harpist Charlotte Balzereit
in the solo parts.
Muti directed these pages as if it were a
Verdian
drama
and as an anticipation of what would come later, that is,
Strauss Jr.'s
New Melodies
group
, where the melodic references to
Rigoletto
and
La traviata
acquired surprising rhythms.
If until that moment the Italian maestro had remained more or less faithful to the metronome, after the fanfare of the waltz
of the Baden girls
and the martial outburst of the Muti wind instruments, he incurred a
not subtle
rubato
with his gaze engrossed in the musicians of the string section.
Although she did not get disheveled, her bangs were ruffled and she had to comb her hair before tackling the three works (the
Margherita
polka
by Josef Strauss, the
Venetian Galop
by Johann Strauss Sr. and
Strauss Jr.'s
Voices of Spring
), by second consecutive year, by
the Spanish José Carlos Martínez.
The beautiful
Blue Danube
was a display of interpretive maturity that gave way to the long-awaited and popular symphonic climax, the
Radetzky March,
which for the second year in a row took the stands in the arrangement signed in tandem by the members of the orchestra to replace the most energetic and controversial version of the composer and
member of the Nazi party
Leopold Weninger.
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