Who’s watching New Year’s Day from Vienna?
mainThe following countries are taking the feed. You may well wonder why, given the horrible history.
EUROPE:
Albania: RTSH
Austria: ORF / 3sat
Azerbaidjan: ICTIMAI
Belgium: VRT / EEN, RTBF
Bosnia-Herzegovina: BHRT
Bulgaria: BNT
Croatia: HRT
Cyprus: CYBC
Czech Republic: CT
Denmark: DR
Estonia: ERR
Finland: YLE
France: FR2
Georgia: GTVR
Germany: ZDF/3SAT
Gibraltar: GBC
Greece: NERI
Hungary: MTV
Iceland: RUV
Ireland: RTE
Italy: RAI
Kosovo: RTK
Latvia: LTV
Lithuania: LRT
Macedonia: MKRTV
Moldova: TRM
Monaco: FR2
Montenegro: RTCG
Netherlands: NOS
Norway: NRK
Poland: TVP2
Portugal: RTP
Romania: TVR
Russia: RTR Kultura
Serbia: RTS
Slovenia: RTVSLO
Slovakia: RTVS
Spain: RTVE
Sweden: SVT
Switzerland: SRF/3SAT, RTS, TSI
Turkey: TRT
United Kingdom: BBC
Ukraine: ZIK TV
AMERICAS:
Bahamas: ZNS
Barbados: CBC
Canada (partly): WNET/PBS
Costa Rica: Canal7/SKY
Cuba: ICRT
Dominican Republic: SKY Central Americas
El Salvador: SKY Central Americas
Guatemala: Canal7 / SKY Central Americas
Honduras: SKY Central Americas
Jamaica: CVM Jamaica
Mexico: SKY Mexico
Nicaragua: Ratensa / SKY Central Americas
Panama: SKY Central Americas
Paraguay: Canal 9
Peru: Canal 9
USA: WNET/PBS
ASIA, OCEANIA:
Australia: SBS Australia
Bangladesh: Maasranga TV
Bhutan: BBS
China: CCTV
Cook Islands: CITV
Fiji: Fiji TV
Hong Kong: ATV
India: Doordarshan TV
Indonesia: Metro TV
Japan: NHK
Kiribati: Fiji TV
Korea: KBS
Maldives: Male TV
Marshall Islands: OTV
Micronesia: OTV
Nauru: Fiji TV
Nepal: NTV
Palau: OTV
Papua New Guinea: Fiji TV
New Zealand: MTV
Samoa: SBC/Fiji TV
Solomon Islands: Fiji TV
Sri Lanka: RC
Taiwan: TTV
Tonga: TBC/Fiji TV
Tuvalu: Fiji TV
Vanuatu: VBTC/Fiji TV
AFRICA:
Mauritius: MBC
Mozambique: SOICO
Namibia: NBC
Seychelles: SBC
South Africa: SABC
Tanzania: ITV
Regardless of the various television feeds, most internet-connected countries will have access to the BBC news story (link below) about the history of the event, reinforcing my opinion that the ossified “traditions” of the concert serve to maintain the whiff of a stadium party rally that wafts around it.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-30536313
What a tendentious article on that BBC News.site. Even contemporary soldiers are getting blamed by cromes of generations ago.
Don’t you think it might be more positive reporting to celebrate the fact that music can unite so many countries?
This annual ritual of resurrecting the Nazi past and counting the women in the orchestra is very tedious.
Better a tedious ritual than to ignore ongoing bigotry.
How about a law that says no orchestra may appear in public without a minimum % of women and minorities reflective of the makeup of the general population? That will settle it the good old fashioned statist fascist way.
I think that’s silly.
Whatever the history may be, the present orchestra is many generations away from that which played in the past and may have had a questionable opinion on some matters.
Let’s get over it! I agree, let’s focus on the unifying power of the concerts nowadays rather than some archive past.
This post is another absolute MUST
(most uninteresting Slippedisc text). Happy NEW Year, hopefully with more valid contributions from now on…
Some people can leave history be history. You seem to like living in the past. I can’t imagine what a sad life you mist have.
My family and myself are watching it with great pleasure.
And it’s good to see that so many countries are tuned in.
Happy New Year !
It is a very impressive list! The orchestra should be commended for bringing so much joy to so many people all over the world.
This concert is clearly a gift that keeps on giving for our Norm in copy terms! Whatever would he do without the straw men of the VPO to kick start the new year?
But hang on a second, where is Will.i.am Oz? Aka ‘Bad Norm’ or in Wagnerian terms Schwarz-Alberich?
Still abed? Or merely expired with righteous indignation and sheer frustration that his campaigning stance has borne no fruit and the wretched thing is STILL being shown all over the world?
As usual, back in the real world where people tune in for the harmless entertainment it is (if a tad predictable) – all seemed to go rather well. Next year Mariss Jansons.
Or Marisa Jansons as he will hopefully be by then. (To show a lead.)
Damned by association? I don’t watch it because I don’t care for the music (as someone said on Rob Cowan’s programme this morning ‘Ho-Hum Strauss’) – and not because we are asked to believe that in 2015 there is an enduring fascism or sexism (perhaps) at work in this fine orchestra.
We’ve had a tradition of many New Years days watching the VPO on PBS while washing down caviar and foie gras with champagne. FM radio also broadcasts the concert. None play Strauss better while women are slooowly beginning to appear. It seems they are slowly owning up to their Nazi past, as well.
In 1960, the NY Philharmonic also had no women in its ranks. Anyone watching last night’s New Years Eve PBS Phil b’cast would have wondered where the men were in the violins.
Members of the Wiener Staatsopernorchester and Wiener Philharmoniker typically retire at the age of 65. So the oldest members of the orchestra which will retire this year were born in or around 1950.
The Nazi regime ended in 1945. Therefore, no one in the orchestra has any active Nazi past to “own up to”.
I hope you don’t believe in concepts like “guilt by association” or “collective guilt”. That’s something the Nazis also believed in. Do you subscribe to this kind of world view?
No.
Oh, good to know! It “sounded” a little bit like that for a moment. It’s better for yourself, too, if you don’t subscribe to concepts like that – you would have sooo much to “own up to” yourself, so much nasty stuff has happened in your own country – during your own life time, while you were watching. But nobody should blame you for that either.
So – since it’s January 1, I was going to say “Happy New Year” now, but then I realized that the Nazis also said “Happy New Year” to people (or in German, “Frohes neues Jahr”, or “Prosit Neujahr” as they like to say in Vienna). Can I say “Happy New Year”, or would that make me a Nazi, because they said that, too?
Whereof Mister Lebrecht cannot speak, thereof he must be silent.
The VPO is one of the last real(!) HIP orchestras in the world that tries to keep the historical performance practise alive until today: players coming from an excellent local kitchen and not from this global mixed kitchen rubbish. VPO is champagne and not Coca Cola. Period!
Strange… No Netrebko posting yet?
It’s easier to attack a Nazi past in Vienna rather than denounce a Neo Nazi present elsewhere… Elle, Elle!!!
You all have too much time on your hands. Whatever happened to the Havana Philharmonic? And why no Palestinians in the Israel Philharmonic? And Sabine Meyer can’t get a job anywhere because of the poisons in farm-raised salmon! And what about that polar ice-cap? No forests, no reeds. Is it true that the mercury in tuna and swordfish as wiped out Jewish string players around the world? Did Yehudi’s strange diet mess up his bow-arm? And the conspiracy of silence surrounding Casals’s death at 97?
Interesting article. I was aware that the New Year’s Concert was first held during the Nazi era – how could I not be, being a somewhat regular reader of this blog! – but I had somehow missed that it was first held for the Winterhilfswerk, a charitable organization to help feed the cold and hungry. That’s great!
Sure, it was an organization run by the Nazi regime – everything was in that period! – but charity is charity, and helping the freezing and starving is a good thing to do, even if Nazis did it, too.
I watched it and a record of my watching will be on the NSA servers. I hope one day Big Brother will not punish me for watching and enjoying(!) this evil sexist nazi orchestra.
As I tend (deplorably but reliably) to have a slightly thick head on NYD, I find the concert an undemanding but powerful tonic and pick-me-up. Its very regularity and changelessness are comforting and desirable therefore.
By the end, I am once more braced and ready to contemplate the new year. And to turn with pleasure to these boards where I know the same old tropes will be hung out like linen on the line…
In fact, moaning about the lack of women in the VPO, and indeed its history, has become a beloved new year tradition all of itself. Some people just can’t do without it.
But shouldn’t some nice new grievances be added to the list in the name of diversity?
Nice new grievances? I am completely sure that the orchestra hopes not! They have been working very hard on their international image and I believe have made great progress. At the end of the day the musicians of the VPO are great artists who simply wish to play great music to the best of their ability. Sonst nichts! Happy New Year!
I’m not especially interested in the historical and gender profiles of the VPO but I value their continuing distinctive style and sound in an age when one orchestra sounds much like another. I watched most of the BBC’s evening recording of the concert and found that I was becoming bored by it all, a great orchestra wasted on an unremarkable selection of pieces and a dutiful audience. As far as I could see few of the players were watching Mehta and I was reminded of Stokowski’s admonition, “You sir, alvays vatch conductor.” I’m not sure they needed to on this occasion.
A running joke at the VPO was, at some time:
On entering a rehearsel one player says to another, referring to the guest conductor: ‘What’s he doing this morning?’ on which the other answers: ‘I don’t know what HE will be doing but WE do Brahms II’.
And that reminds me that some years ago I was singing in a choir with the regional symphony orchestra, no names. I knew the leader quite well and during the interval asked what he thought of the visiting conductor. “Don’t know,” he replied, “I wasn’t looking.”
“I watched most of the BBC’s evening recording of the concert and found that I was becoming bored by it all, a great orchestra wasted on an unremarkable .”
Agreed. It looked and sounded sterile. All this plus horrible choreography and Julie Andrews reading a few lines of medieval poetry. Oy!
The fact that these goopy dance sequences were filmed in July didn’t help set the wintry new year’s mood.
They whole production has become too much of a production. I miss the days when Walter Cronkite (US host) would just shut up, the cameras would stick to the stage, and the music would simply play.
We have enjoyed the New Year Concerts from Vienna for many years, and this one was awful in view of past concerts. What a shame!!! There was little inspiration and NONE from the
conductor. We look forward to the “Real” Vienna New Year Concert in 2016.
Watched the concert tonight. I see that Zubin Mehta, Music Director for Life of the Israel Philharmonic, was on the podium this year. Hmm
Indeed, and for he 5th time! Hmm…
Daniel Farber: Bravo! Norman: what is your view on the VPO? – you set this coconut shy up! Not merely playing devil’s advocate I trust?
I do not consider the issues of NAZI (tx, MICHAEL SCHAFFER for the clarification) &whether or not the gender issue in Violins (VPO) matters, either in 2014 or in 2015. Having watched here in Indonesian Metro TV, I truly enjoyed most of the performances. I found Johann Strauss’ piece with clapping audience and some “tweeting” sounds in an earlier piece unique and pumping up the New Yea’s spirit. Despite the recorded & selected masterpieces (in less than 60″), and in the midst of post-plane accident on the local TV running text, we were comforted by Vienna’s, weren’t you?
Can anyone tell me why we cannot find New Year’s Day Vienna on PBS philadelphia we have searched up and down the pbs programs and nothing listed for today. Please we really want to see this we have not missed one in over 16 years