Any conductor who tackles the legendary New Year`s Day Concert in Vienna, needs To have taken dancing to heart. For Nikolaus Harnonoourt, European dance forms have always been a family concern. “My mother was famous for her csárdás dancing,” he reealled recently. “She even showed me the steps. And she used to dance among harvesters in autumn. My grandparents owned land in Hungary and regularly used to hear the gypsy bands.” Harnoncourt reminisces about the lure of the dance and its place in his musical upbringing. “In the time of my grandparents, these popular dance forms were known to virtually every educated person," he told me. "Everybody danced three types of polka, two types of waltz as well as the various types of Slavonic and Hungarian dances.”
Harnoncourt's father had close family connections with Czechoslovakia and knew all the Czech dances. “When a polka was played really beautifully, he was always in tears. Which is why it is all very natural for me." A devoted amateur pianist and composer, Harnoncourt père had joined the navy because he thought there would be a piano on every ship. He knew Franz Lehár, who was also in the navy - another reason for joining up - but World War I intervened and shelved any reasonable opportunity for naval musicmaking. During Harnoncourt's childhood quality light music re-surfaced with a vengeance. “I think that my father must have been one of the first people in Austria who played the music of George Gershwin, because in the 1930s his brother sent him all the piann scores. When I was a boy in the mid20s I heard my father playing Offenbach, Johann and Josef Strauss, Lehár and Gershwin.”
Talking about the Strausses, Harnoncourt ponders the differences between the brothers Johann and Josef. “With Josef, it’s a different kind of inspiration,” he says. “Josef thought more in sounds: he was always tone painting. Josef painted like Turner, and Johann Strauss Like Caspar David Friedrich. With Josef, everything is in the harmonies, and the instrumentation is very refined. Also, maybe his work is a bit more Romantic than Johann’s. But on the other hand one can see in the compositions that both wrote together that they were real brothers! In all honesty I couldn't rank them in ingenuity, any more than I could say who was the more inspired - Mozart or Beethoven.”
The process of selection for this second Harnoncourt New Year’s Day Concert (his first was in 2001) centres around a celebrated Strauss family connoisseur, Franz Mailer, President of the Viennese Johann Strauss Society. "He knows practically everything of, and about, Johann Strauss. So, first he makes an initial proposition. Then it’s sent to me and to the head of the Wenna Philharmonic, and we discuss. There should always be a kind of equilibrium between the well-known and less familiar pieces. The audience needs to hold on to that sense of familiarity; it doesn't want one 'new' piece following on after another."
The present programme enjoys a number of novel features. For example, there is the Berlioz orchestration of Weber's Invitation to the Dance. “I hesitated a little there because of the instrumentation," confesses Harnoncourt, "but it is after all the first official introduction of the waltz into symphonic music." Then there are two Brahms Hungarian Dances, logical choices given their folklike character and Brahms's great admiration for Johann Strauss. Harnoncourt presents them here in an unpublished orchestration by Friedrich D. Reichert (l838-1889), the manuscript of which has survived in the Bralnns Bequest in the archives of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, Vienna.
Harnoncourt's musicological instincts - guided here by Michael Rot, editor of the new Johann Strauss Critical Complete Edition - have homed in on the best and most reliable sources, leading in at least one instance, the Chinese Galop, to some revised orchestration. "We changed quite a lot in rehearsal," he says, "bringing things closer to the original, the use of the piccolo, doubling instruments... that sort of thing." The musical collaboration with the Philharmonic is famously successful, but past Viennese Straussians are more a source of interest than a practical inspiration. "If I want this music to activate my imagination, I simply look at the scores," insists Harnoncourt. “But I’d single out Clemens Krauss as being one of the more interesting of older Strauss conductors. I played at least 50 concerts with him during my days as a cellist with the Vienna Symphony - mostly Mozart but also a lot of Johann Strauss. And then there was Robert Stolz. Stolz actually knew Johann Strauss: when he was a teenager Strauss estimated him as a very, very gifted conductor."
Harnoncourt feels that since that 2001 concert his way with the Strauss's music has undergone a subtle curve of development. "I have conducted a lot of folkloric music in the last two years and I think nowadays maybe I know more and I feel more in this music. But I was very content with the last concert, so I don't really need to alter my approach. Austrian music critics have said that it would be extremely difficult for me to be in a 'challenge situation' with myself. I don`t really feel that way. For me, it’s a very interesting project - and a very fresh project. So why look back?"