01/01/12 New Year’s Day from Vienna 11am
Latvian conductor Mariss Jansons makes his much anticipated second appearance at the helm of the Vienna Philharmonic for their 2012 New Year’s Concert. This concert series is so insanely popular, the Vienna Phil holds a lottery for ticket sales a year in advance!
Don’t worry, you won’t have to go any further than WBJC to enjoy this long-standing tradition.
The live broadcast of the New Years from Vienna is something I both look forward to and dread. As a fan of European performances, I truly enjoy hearing an audience interact and enjoy themselves at a concert. It’s on my bucket list to someday go to the Bayreuth Festival and also to experience a truly great European concert performance like New Years from Vienna.
But as Operations Assistant, I know about the stress live feeds can cause station personnel. Back on Saturday, Jan 1 2005, we were caught completely off-guard when the live feed ended without playing the Radetzky March!
The Radetzky March has been a concert fixture since 1958. While I haven’t listened that long, I’ve listened long enough that it certainly was an uncomfortable and somewhat scary thing not to hear it played. Listeners were upset, and the phones went mad! Kati saved the day (in what was probably the fastest “DJ Dash” in WBJC history) by grabbing a CD recording of a live Vienna Phil concert and playing the March.
As we were working on the website today, I reminisced about that day and wondered just what had happened. A little bit of digging cleared up the mystery: Loren Maazel omitted the Radetzky March to honor the hundreds of thousands of victims of the Boxing Day Tsunami that occurred just 6 days earlier.
Now that’s class.
Tags:2011 holiday, holidays, vienna
