This is the tenth time that Lorin Maazel has conducted the New Year’s Concert in Vienna, more often than anyone since Willi Boskovsky. What is always endearing is that Maazel, unlike any maestro since that former concert-master, boldly takes up his solo violin, entering into the fun in a way that lightens his once-severe image. He sets the right atmosphere with his two concertante items, the Scherz-Polka of Johann Strauss II and the Walzer a la Paganini of Strauss I, both arranged for him by Michael Rot, and what does it matter if most of the violin section of the Vienna Philharmonic could play them just as well?

The distinctive point about this year’s concert is that it marked the centenary of the death of the younger Johann and the 150th of his father. Aptly the programme starts with the very first of his hundreds of opuses, the ‘Epigram Waltz’, Sinngedichte, precisely setting out the pattern he always favoured in waltzes, just as winningly lyrical as the many later favourites. Some New Year’s Concerts take you by storm with their bite and energy, and at least one – Karajan’s single appearance not long before he died (11/87) – conveyed a valedictory quality amid the sparkle. This one makes its points above all by charming.

The seductive languor of the introduction to G’schichten aus dem Wienerwald (‘Tales from the Vienna Woods’), with its haunting zither solo, sets the pattern, followed by such rarities as the late Donauweibchen Waltz (‘Little Woman of the Danube’) on themes from the operetta, Simplicius, and the Hopser-Polka, insinuating rather than thrusting. The uproarious Banditen-Galopp, with its police-whistles and gunshots, then raises the temperature, and the well-known sequence of favourites at the end sparkles as brightly as ever, even if the audience’s clapping in the inevitable encore, the Radetzky March, is no better disciplined than usual. As ever, a winning disc.

-- Edward Greenfield, Gramophone [4/1999]