Conductor: Christoph Altstaedt
There are at least two forms of New Year’s Day Concert: one that features the music of Johann Strauss I and II in the middle of a whole string of other items, the other that features the music of Johann Strauss I and II – full stop. Fortunately the Opera North concert under the title Viennese Whirl fell into the former category. Thus we had splendid pieces by Reznicek, Waldteufel and the neglected Strauss brother, Eduard, and glorious novelties by Lumbye, Ziehrer and Leroy Anderson alongside the more familiar Strauss fare – and even a Johann II rarity!
Christoph Altstaedt presided with gentle humour, digging out unexpected facts about the pieces being played, tuning up his typewriter for Anderson’s The Typewriter and going missing during the inevitable second encore, Johann I’s Radetsky March – the orchestra seemed happy enough on their own!
The concert began with a once popular Overture, Donna Diana by Nikolaus von Reznicek, bubbling with life and overlapping melodies, dynamic and imaginatively scored. Listening to it again, one couldn’t help wondering at its disappearance from concert programmes. Waldteufel’s Skaters Waltz is a concert regular, but Altstaedt brought out the elegance of ice-skaters beautifully, as he did with Eduard Strauss’ Telephone Polka, a surprisingly stylish polka francaise, giving way to a little joke at the end, with the sound of the telephone.
For comic effects you generally had to look elsewhere, especially to Hans Christian Lumbye, The Strauss of the North. The Copenhagen Steam Railway Galop is a work of irreversible momentum, with brisk percussion driving the train along and bells and whistles echoing its progress, while The Champagne Galop has fun with champagne corks popping. Perhaps the most striking use of novelty elements came in Carl Michael Ziehrer’s Nightowls Waltz, with the orchestra out on the town, singing a sentimental ditty (perhaps a hint of Yale College’s Whiffenpoofs) and following it up by whistling the theme. Overall the piece moved through lively dances and high jinks and returned, rather movingly, to the song at the end. As for the Johann Strauss II novelty, in 1860 he saw Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld in Vienna and was inspired to write a Quadrille, a medley of its tunes as dance music, stopping and starting, delivered in dynamic brass-heavy style. The later stages were all Johann Strauss I and II, with the explosive Thunder and Lightning Polka followed by the elegantly poised On the beautiful blue Danube.
The only disappointment was that soprano Jennifer France, suffering with a cold, opted out of the fiendishly challenging Glitter and Be Gay from Bernstein’s Candide. She did, however, relish the comedy of Menotti’s The Telephone and soared splendidly on Juliet’s Waltz Song from Gounod’s Romeo et Juliette, repeating the feat on her encore.
Altstaedt’s urbanity and sense of humour, allied to the orchestra’s attack and urgency, made for an exhilarating concert in which Mandy Leung’s Nostos, the latest in the Minute Masterpieces, made its mark as derived from Aaron Copland – and none the worse for that.
Reviewed on 30th December 2022.
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