Every New Year’s Eve and Day the Vienna Philharmonic performs a concert of waltzes and polkas in the beautiful Grosser Saal of the Musikverein. The New Year’s Day concert is broadcast around the world, bringing the grace and charm of fin-de-siécle Vienna with it. The concerts invariably feature music by the Strauss family. Not to be confused with Richard Strauss, the composer of Der Rosenkavalierand Ein Heldenleben, the ‘other’ Strausses were a dynasty of composers beginning with Johann Strauss I, born in 1804. Strauss senior popularized the still new-waltz genre, bringing it into Vienna’s ballrooms with his orchestra. He wrote the famous Radetzky march that nowadays completes each concert with the audience clapping along. But his waltzes were eclipsed by those written by his son,

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It has been many months since I had the pleasure of writing this column, and a great deal has happened in the interim. You may remember we ended last season with performances from Wagner’s opera Götterdämmerung. This is the stuff conductors’ dreams are made of, so my summer began in tremendously high spirits. After a week unwinding in one of my favourite cities, Tel Aviv, I flew to Australia for two weeks with the Australian Youth Orchestra. Since it was to be my time visiting Australia, I arrived in Sydney a week before rehearsals began to spend time seeing the sights. Sydney Harbour is breath-taking, crowned by the iconic opera house. The British and Irish influence on Australian culture made everything strangely familiar, and I

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