New Year's Concert Wiener Philharmoniker 2022

The Vienna Philharmonic Summer Night Concert 2021, conducted by Daniel Harding with Igor Levit as soloist, was recorded again this year by Sony Classical. The Summer Night Concert, which took place on June 18, 2021, is an outdoor concert held annually since 2008, following the "Concert for Europe" held from 2004 to 2007. The baroque park of Schönbrunn Palace provides an enchanting backdrop for the concert. Among the illustrious conductors who have conducted the Vienna Philharmonic's Summer Night Concert in recent years are Georges Prêtre, Daniel Barenboim, Franz Welser-Möst, Valery Gergiev, Lorin Maazel, Christoph Eschenbach, Zubin Mehta, Semyon Bychkov and Gustavo Dudamel.

In the autumn of 1872 Anton Bruckner – court organist, university professor and a late developer as a composer – had the opportunity to present his Second Symphony to the Vienna Philharmonic. But its conductor Otto Dessoff, who only a few years later was to conduct the world première of Brahms’s First Symphony and who had arranged a run-through of several new works, including Bruckner’s Second, dismissed the symphony as “impossible” and even as pure “nonsense”, a view contested by a number of other members of the orchestra who raised their voices in its defence. And indeed the Vienna Philharmonic did finally perform the symphony at a public concert a year later to mark the official ending of the Vienna World Fair on 26 October 1873 – without Dessoff. Bruckner himself con- ducted the performance, which was financed by a noble patron – at the previous year’s ill-starred rehearsal he had only been allowed to indicate the tempi. “First rejection” he had noted in his diary at that time, as if it was already obvious to him that this was not to be his last such rejection.