Vienna/Venice/Rai, New Year’s concerts 2023
by Roberta Pedrotti
The comparison between the broadcasts of the New Year’s concerts from Vienna and Venice highlights how in the universal language of music, there are specific jargons and idioms, which can be mastered naturally and with perfect identity between forms and meanings or forced into half-hearted translations.
Music is a universal language. We must pay attention to this maxim repeated everywhere: the theme of the meaning of music is sufficiently broad, complex and debated in history that it would be impossible to give an unequivocal definition that is not at least limited to a style, an author, a piece. Certainly, since it is a non-verbal expression, the limits and boundaries of the word are transcended and translation is not necessary, however, in order to be able to express oneself in music it is necessary to know this language, which can also speak to pure instinct, but however, it has its own structures, forms, rules and peculiar characteristics.
The difference between the New Year’s concerts in Vienna and Venice lies precisely in a distance of language.
The Neujharskonzert has a very strong identity that makes a repertoire correspond to the spirit of celebration – and of the passing of time, to the relationship between the senses and transcendence – and of a city. This repertoire and this spirit are embodied in an orchestra which has in its genetic code an idea of sound and phrasing which is exactly the language of this style. So even a conductor like Franz Welser-Möst, who isn’t exactly a prodigy of charisma and imagination but knows this world well, ends up working better than colleagues who are perhaps more authoritative and yet also more “external”. He certainly functions, does not electrify like a Kleiber or a Jansons, nor express to the fullest degree the ideal of the Konzertmeister like a Boskovsky, but neither is he ever extraneous to language.
Conversely, the Concerto veneziano was born as a national opposition to Vienna and therefore takes, by virtue of its cultural matrix, a repertoire that has a completely different function and collocation: the arias, the symphonies, the opera choruses are born as parts of a text unique musical theatre. Proposing them as detached pieces in concert is something that can very well be done, but it is difficult, however satisfying it may be, to achieve full coherence and in any case it cannot invent a perfect identity such as that between the Viennese dances, the city , the party. On the contrary, often the thought of the context leads to malicious smiles of the menacing developments that the single brilliant piece will then have (years ago, and several times, one ventured into the jubilant choirs from the Lucia of Lammermoor, not exactly the height of joy if you think about how they will end!). Moreover, when one chooses to use the work and to opt for the gala of detached pieces by focusing on the musical charm rather than on the expressive and dramatic content, one should at least show that one really believes in the proposed repertoire. Once again, instead, a disorganized series of pieces is found concocted with ruthless and senseless cuts: the aim is to enhance the music of Rossini and then of the symphony of Guillaume Tell only the galop is proposed, as if the entire piece (one of the most popular and immediately captivating in the repertoire) was considered indigestible for the television and party-going public. We talk about Puccini and the usual core of the finale is presented Turandot in the drafting of Alfano (never mentioned, moreover, in the chronicles). Therefore, a language is forced out of its logical and natural context without even believing in its value.
Luckily things went a little better in terms of the cast, since, if you want to give any singer, regardless of his characteristics, a pre-established program, at least the quality of pure lyricism at ease in Federica Lombardi’s Mozart and Puccini it allowed her to cross the path from Norma to Musetta, from Turandot to Violetta unscathed. Ditto, Freddie De Tommaso has found a rather coherent, if even somewhat stentorian, definition between Don José, Calaf and Alfredo. Among the conductors who passed through the Fenice on New Year’s Eve, Daniel Harding demonstrated demonstration and enthusiasm superior to many if not all; to evaluate it better we would have liked to listen immediately to Mendelssohn’s Italian presented in the first part, but it is known that Rai promotes one of his concerts showing at the same time the terror of playing too much music (or of diverting attention from the Urbi blessing et orbi)
Then, of course, there is the dance. In the party you dance, and if you don’t dance you watch others do it, you listen to danceable music. The Viennese have always done this, it is done occasionally at the opera, but in creating a concert like the Venetian one it seems mandatory to follow the Austrian example, which nevertheless remains successful even in terms of floral decorations, much finer. This year the choreographer Davide Bombana with the étoile Jacopo Tissi and the corps de ballet from Massimo di Palermo seems to have measured everything better than seen in the past (not for nothing, coincidentally, he worked on three Viennese New Years), so that we have not found the unpleasant sensation of a dance detached from the music and schematized in steps and tableaux for their own sake, forcibly slowed down so as not to risk being out of sync. However, dancing among Tiepolo’s paintings to Mascagni’s notes appears so specious as to become surreal, especially if shortly after we have the comparison with the fairy-tale naturalness of the Viennese couples (including two Italians, Davide given, soloist in the polka Auf und vom by Eduard Strauss, Calogero Failla). The identity between the palaces and parks of the Austrian capital and the music of the Strauss family is innate, inevitable; one perceives a common language between sounds, architecture, costumes – how wonderful those striking chromatic combinations! – and story-telling movements in the academic passages as well as in the more acted sequences, full of playful sensuality. In short, we have attempts at translation in Venice, in Vienna a language spoken by native speakers without the need for intermediaries.
While remaining true to itself, a living tradition, the Neujahrskonzert is continually renewing its programme: in addition to the presence of wonderful children’s and youth choirs with the debut of the Wiener Chormädchen, the female formation of the Wiener Sängerknaben, this year too we had a large number of first performances as proof of how this repertoire is an inexhaustible source of musical pearls. If anything, a knot that seems to be stagnant is that of wands, which until recently alternated returns and debuts, while now for some years, as confirmed by Christian Thielemann’s announcement for 2024, you have seen the recurrence of already tested names. The impression is that after the disappearance of Mariss Jansons a reference figure is missing and outside the circle of usual collaborations it is difficult to identify some new name, a story capable of fully convincing the orchestra (and, if it is allowed to think badly, the market record). Let’s really hope that some healthy fresh air will soon blow away, without necessarily sweeping away the rest.
On the other hand, that of the performers is a theme that is of little interest to the current state of the Venetian concert, conditioned as it is by a “tradition” designed in vitro on an artificial language in which not even the creators themselves seem to believe and in fact proposes, without a minimum of imagination and research, a very small list of recurring pieces. Likewise, it will perhaps be in this different tradition, natural and artificial, that paradoxically the 2021 concert, in lockdown, worked better in Venice than in Vienna [Venezia, concerto di Capodanno, 01/01/2021].
Finally, one last observation on presentations and schedules: it would be nice to avoid some of that hyperbolic rhetoric that arouses counterproductive irony in the texts read by Roberto Chevalier for the Fenice, as happens in Vienna, where we limit ourselves to a few brief anecdotes that contextualize the tracks. Nothing to say about the beautiful Venetian homage to Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, who died the day before and a competent music lover, with the Tearful from Mozart’s Requiem, but perhaps during the transmission from Vienna it was a bit excessive to insist on three dedications entrusted to the commentator Christel Galatzer. With all due respect, even the late one has his times, his places, his measures. As for the schedule: the more concerts there are, the better it is, of course, however wanting to overlap them creates annoying and useless rivalries. Why not broadcast the Vienna concert entirely live, as in the rest of the world (Rai has three main generalist networks and many other topics: we do not consider this small internal competition to the papal blessing unthinkable) and place a possible concert from Venice elsewhere time, for example in the early evening of New Year’s Eve and on January 1st itself?