There is a temptation, when confronted with yet another Viennese New Year’s disc, to reach for the dismissive adjective — “charming,” say, or “festive” — and leave the room. Johannes Wildner and the Vienna Johann Strauss Orchestra do not deserve that treatment.
This ensemble has a history worth remembering. Willi Boskovsky founded it in 1969, after his long tenure leading the Vienna Philharmonic’s own New Year’s Concerts had run its glorious course — he wanted a vehicle that could keep the Strauss tradition alive year-round, free of the Philharmonic’s institutional gravity. Wildner has inherited something real, not merely a brand name. And he knows it.
The program itself is smartly built. Three Strausses — father, and both sons — share the stage, which is as it should be. Johann Senior’s Radetzky March closes things, as tradition demands, but the disc earns its ending rather than coasting toward it. What comes before is genuinely varied: Josef’s Dynamiden Waltz, long a Boskovsky signature, gets a reading of real weight and sweep, its chromatically restless harmonies — Josef was always the brooding one, the Schubert of the family — given room to breathe rather than being hurried past in a blur of Viennese charm.
The quadrille is a discovery for anyone who hasn’t encountered it. Johann Jr. built it on themes from Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera, and the result is a small cabinet of wonders — Italianate melody filtered through Viennese rhythm, the seams surprisingly invisible.
Wildner’s way with the polkas is telling. The Jokey-Polka — and yes, “Jokey” is the German transliteration of “jockey,” the piece a kind of galloping equestrian sketch — never tips into mugging. The orchestra stays light on its feet without losing energy, which is harder to manage than it sounds; the wrong maestro turns this into vaudeville. The Annen-Polka, op. 117, is all delicacy and insinuation, the violins producing that particular Viennese sweetness that is less a matter of vibrato than of touch — a softness at the tip of the bow that no amount of instruction can quite convey, only tradition.
Tales from the Vienna Woods — thirteen minutes of it — is taken without a zither, which is a loss. The instrument’s ghostly, silvery timbre in that waltz is not decorative; it carries something essential about memory and distance, the sense that Vienna is always being recalled rather than experienced. Still, the strings handle the melody with genuine affection, and the coda doesn’t drag.
An der schönen blauen Donau — the Blue Danube — is the work that will make or break any such release. Karajan’s 1987 New Year’s performance with the Vienna Philharmonic remains a benchmark: unhurried, inevitable, the famous opening mists given time to coalesce. Wildner doesn’t try to match that particular grandeur. His reading is warmer, more domestic — a ballroom rather than a concert hall — and it works on its own terms. The waltz was written, after all, for the Vienna Men’s Choral Society, premiered in a casino, not a temple of high culture. Wildner seems to understand that.
The recording venue matters here. Casino Zögernitz, founded in 1837, was one of Johann Strauss Senior’s own haunts — the elder Strauss played there when the younger was still a teenager learning the violin on the sly, since his father famously opposed a musical career for his son. There is something quietly pointed about performing this music in that room: a return, a reclamation. The acoustic is warm without being muddy, and the engineers have captured the wind solos — piquant, characterful — with exceptional presence.
The Johann Jr. works appear in new scholarly editions, which matters more than it might seem. The familiar published texts of this repertoire carry decades of accumulated reading accretions — ritards that aren’t in the score, ornaments that crept in and calcified. Fresh editions force everyone to listen again.
Is this the finest Strauss collection in the catalog? No. Clemens Krauss’s old Decca recordings have a spring and a specificity that remain unmatched, and Carlos Kleiber’s single New Year’s Concert disc is in a category by itself. But this is a serious, joyful, well-played record — and in a repertoire where the mediocre outnumber the good by a considerable margin, that is nothing to wave away.
