Best of New Year's Concert.(Sound Recording Review)

Best of New Year's Concert. Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. Various conductors. DG B0001663-02 (2-disc set).

As all of you are aware, the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra has been presenting a New Year's concert of music by the Strauss family since 1939, and most of these concerts have been recorded live; at least most of them for the past forty-odd years. DG have brought together what they consider the best of these recordings in a two-disc set for those listeners who simply cannot get enough of the stuff.

I found myself indifferent to most of it. The conductors represented are Claudio Abbado, Willi Boskovsky (the concerts' longest-running conductor, from 1955-1979), Herbert von Karajan, Clemens Krauss (who conducted the premiere concert and most of those thereafter until his death in 1954), Josef Krips, Lorin Maazel, Riccardo Muti, and Seiji Ozawa, with a bonus track by Hans Knappertbusch, who never actually conducted a New Year's concert but was closely associated with the orchestra throughout his career. For the life of me I could not figure out his inclusion. Anyway, the years of the recordings span 1958 (Krips) to 2002 (Ozawa), and the recordings come both from DG and Decca (they are now Universal siblings, after all).

The sonics are ...