Viennese Whirl – Huddersfield Town Hall

Conductor: Jonathan Bloxham

You can always rely on the Orchestra of Opera North to impart a twist to any concert they are involved with – and so it was with their take on the New Year’s Day concert in Vienna. Few, if any, of the British versions of Vienna’s New Year concert cover such a wide variety of pieces. The old Austrian Empire got a look in with pieces from Dvorak and Brahms, the next generation’s Austrian exile Erich Korngold put in an appearance and there were even a couple of items by George Gershwin, though the title of the second one, By Strauss (sung with operatic flair by Alexandra Lowe) was a bit of a give-away.

Furthermore, despite the concert ending with a sumptuous performance of Johann Strauss II’s On the Beautiful Blue Danube, each strain more elegant than the previous, Strauss waltzes were, by and large, conspicuous by their absence: instead we had an exhilarating succession of polkas and galops.

Jonathan Bloxham clearly has a taste for such pieces and the mood of the afternoon was set when he bounded on to the platform and launched into Dvorak’sCarnivalOverture, a blazing start with brass very much to the fore. Dvorak was to show up later in the first half, with his melancholy, gently melodic Slavonic Dance Opus 72 No. 2 contrasted with Brahms’ gloriously tipsy Hungarian Dance No. 6, with further brass explosions coming just when you least expected them.

Apart from the Gershwin, Alexandra Lowe’s creamy soprano was heard at its best in a couple of Lehar gems, Vilja – with diaphanous string sound behind the chorus – and Meine Lippen, sie kussen so heiss – a typically luscious melody, with a wild interlude between the verses and soaring soprano at the end.

The Strauss pieces tended to an almost manic sense of fun, Johann I’s Furioso Galop a bubbling perpetuum mobile, Johann II’s Thunder and Lightning Polka a holiday for percussion, thunder sheet and all, the Pizzicato Polka showing off the precision of the strings. Best of all was Johann II’s wonderful Eljen a Magyar! (Long live the Magyar!) – the programme note referred to “the pungent Hungarian flavour” of a piece that swept from one exhilarating melody to another.

A welcome guest from outside the Austrian Empire was the Alsatian Jacques Offenbach whose Can Can fromOrpheus in the Underworld provided a suitably breathless ending to the first half, though none of the audience took up Bloxham’s invitation to join in and dance. No such inhibition about clapping in time to the traditional second encore as the orchestra brought military precision to Johann I’s Radetsky March. A word, too, for the first encore (Excursion Train Polka, perhaps), which rattled over the rails to the accompaniment of some unorthodox sounds from the percussion section.

Reviewed on 29th December 2023.