#Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra

[surfingkaliyuga]

Die Walküre (1955) Original His Master's Voice cover artwork with slight alterations for the Warner Classics edition.

[paul-archibald]

Herbert von Karajan (1908-1989)

Richard Strauss (1864-1949)Der Rosenkavalier: Introduction to Act I (1956)Philharmonia Chorus and Orch / Karajan Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)Symphony No 5 Movt IV: Finale (1984)Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra / Karajan Richard Wagner (1813-1883)Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg Act III Scene 5 (1951)Bayreuth Festival Chorus and Orchestra / Karajan Pietro Mascagni (1863-1945)Intermezzo from…

[rastronomicals]

6:20 AM EDT October 2, 2024:

Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra -   "The Ride Of The Valkyries (Richard Wagner)" From the Soundtrack album Apocalypse Now OMPST (1979)

Last song scrobbled from iTunes at Last.fm

[idroolinmysleep]

Robert Schumann, Julius Caesar Overture, op. 128, Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, Sir Georg Solti, cond.

[cultreslut]

richard strauss, the vienna philharmonic orchestra, & georg solti, elektra, 1967

archive / discogs

[innerrecordsleeves]

Paper sleeve with plastic inner that includes detailed handling and playing instructions in grey print on the front. Decorated with stars and including a British patent number. Taken with and without flash. Reverse is blank. Found within London Records catalog number 5644 - mono pressing of "A Christmas Offering" by Leontyne Price and Herbert von Karajan with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus.

[useless-catalanfacts]

Trying not to sing along with the Trinca lyrics when the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra plays the Blue Danube

[girlactionfigure]

THURSDAY HERO: Herbert Zipper

Herbert Zipper was a conductor and composer who founded a secret orchestra at Dachau, and wrote a song that became an anthem for death camp inmates.

Born in 1904 to an affluent Jewish family in Vienna, Herbert was a musical prodigy who studied at the prestigious Vienna Music Academy with the great composer Richard Strauss. He found employment as a conductor and composer for cabaret shows.

Germany annexed Austria in 1938 and immediately started persecuting Jewish citizens. Herbert was arrested that year and sent by the SS to Dachau, where he became a “horse,” pushing a wheelbarrow loaded with heavy rocks for 12 hours a day. One of the most talented composers in Europe was doing the work of an animal.

Herbert was not the only music man in Dachau. All the Jewish members of the Munich Philharmonic – comprising most of the orchestra – were also incarcerated there. Herbert enlisted the other musicians in an audacious, even insane, plan. They would make instruments and create an orchestra, right there at Dachau.

How could anybody create musical instruments in a concentration camp? They combed the camp for discarded pieces of wood and metal and fashioned eleven primitive yet functional instruments. At least one guard helped the musicians; Herbert requested a piece of wire for a string instrument, and later found it under his pillow.

Herbert’s Dachau orchestra performed concerts for the other inmates every Sunday, in an outhouse. It’s hard to imagine the experience of listening to sublime music in a filthy environment, while knowing they could be all killed for their participation. Herbert said that the concerts were not for entertainment, but rather to bring purpose and even a bit of normalcy back to their lives.

Noted playwright Jura Soyfer, an old friend of Herbert’s from his cabaret days, was also at Dachau. Together they wrote “Dachaulied” (Dachau song), with Herbert composing the haunting music in his head and Jura penning the sad, sardonic lyrics inspired by the concentration camp motto “Work will make you free.” They thought that writing the song would help them maintain some dignity in an atmosphere of constant humiliation and demonization. Herbert deliberately made the song difficult to learn, so that his fellow inmates would have to use all of their concentration and thereby mentally escape from their horrific surroundings. Amazingly, the Nazis never discovered the secret orchestra.

At the end of 1938, Herbert and Jura were transferred to Buchenwald where they taught other inmates the Dachau song. Soon after, Jura died of typhus at age 26, and Herbert lovingly prepared his body for burial. At this time Hitler hadn’t yet began to implement his “Final Solution” to kill all the Jews, which started in 1941. Herbert’s father Emil was in London, desperately trying to get a visa for Herbert and his two brothers to escape Austria. Miraculously, Emil was able to secure his sons’ release from Buchenwald, and they joined him in Paris on March 16, 1939.

During all this time, Herbert’s fiancee, dancer Trudl Dubsky, was working in Manila, in the Philippines. She recommended him for the job of conductor of the Manila Symphony Orchestra, and he was hired, traveling there in September, 1939. Herbert and Trudl were married on October 1. Although it wasn’t a world-class orchestra at the time, Herbert enjoyed working with the Manila Orchestra and under his leadership it improved dramatically. Life was good for Herbert and Trudl until January 1942, when the Japanese army invaded the Philippines and occupied Manila. It was a brutal occupation and once again Herbert was arrested, this time for refusing to conduct the orchestra for Japanese military officers. He was incarcerated and harshly interrogated for four months before being released. For the next three years Herbert and Trudl survived hand-to-mouth, owning no belongings and traveling frequently in search of safe haven in a country at war.

The most difficult period was the Battle of Manila in early 1945. More than once the building where they took shelter was bombed by the Japanese artillery and they escaped with only seconds to spare. In the end of February they were living with hundreds of other displaced people in a seven-story building in Manila that had neither electricity or water. Herbert volunteered to get water every day, a dangerous and difficult undertaking.  On the early morning of February 26, 1945, Herbert was on his water run when he saw an opportunity to reach the American front line, and he rushed across a battle field to do it. While there he received a crucial piece of information: the apartment building where he was staying was due to be bombed by the Allies within fifteen minutes! Herbert desperately explained that 800-1000 civilians were inside the building! Due to his pleas, the bombardment was delayed for 45 minutes, giving him just enough time to get back to the building and rescue everyone inside including Trudl.

Until Japan was defeated on September 2, 1945, Herbert worked secretly for the American army under the command of General Douglas MacArthur, transmitting valuable information about Japanese shipping schedules by shortwave radio. When Japan finally surrendered, Herbert organized and conducted a concert of Beethoven’s “Eroica” symphony, a goal he’d set during the darkest hours at Dachau. The concert was performed in a bombed-out church.

Herbert and Trudl immigrated to America in 1946, joining the rest of his family. He co-founded and conducted the Brooklyn Symphony Orchestra, and organized another orchestra especially to give free concerts for public school children. Students called Herbert, who had no children of his own, “Papa Z.” For the rest of his life he volunteered and supported arts education for young people.

Herbert was close friends with poet Langston Hughes and they collaborated on an opera together, “Barrier.” Trudl worked as a ballet tacher. They moved to Chicago in 1953, where Herbert founded the Music Center of the North Shore, and then to Los Angeles, where Herbert directed the School of Performing Arts at USC.

Interviewed by a Los Angeles Times reporter at the end of his life, Herbert said “We have to see the world as it is, but we have to think about what the world could be. That’s what the arts are about.”

Herbert is the subject of a biography, “Dachau Song: The Twentieth Century Odyssey of Herbert Zipper,” and a documentary that was nominated for an Academy Award. His beloved wife Trudl died of lung cancer in 1976. He continued his music for two more decades, conducting his last concert in 1996. Herbert Zipper died in Santa Monica in 1997.

For inspiring concentration camp inmates and inner-city schoolchildren with his music, and for saving hundreds of lives during the Japanese occupation of the Philippines, we honor Herbert Zipper as this week’s Thursday Hero.

Lyrics of Dachau Song:

Barbed wire fraught with death surrounds our world

On which a merciless heaven visits frost and sunburn.

Far from us are all joys, far our home, far the women

When mute we march to work, thousands in the gray dawn.

But we learned the Dachau motto and it made us hard as steel.

Be a man, comrade, remain human comrade

Do good work, pitch in, comrade

Because work, work will make you free!

[haveyouheardthisband]

[maaarine]

When an Orchestra Was No Place for a Woman (Farah Nayeri, The New York Times, Dec 23 2019)

"The Vienna Philharmonic, established in 1842, has been weighed down by history and by tradition, and by a somewhat convoluted recruitment process.

All players are recruited from the orchestra of the Vienna State Opera.

And until 1997, the opera would not allow women to audition for the philharmonic.

(The Vienna Philharmonic did have a woman performing regularly with it by then — the harpist Anna Lelkes played with them for 26 years, but was not allowed to join formally, and did not receive full payment, until 1997.) (…)

Women still make up less than half of most orchestras in Continental Europe.

An August 2019 survey by two University College London academics showed that in Continental orchestras, 36.6 percent of members were women.

In the United States, it was 40 percent, and in Britain, 44 percent.

“I don’t want to throw stones at Vienna, because all of us in classical music are in glass houses, in all questions of diversity,” said Gillian Moore, director of music at the Southbank Center in London, which includes the Royal Festival Hall.

“It’s clearly an odd thing to see an orchestra that is so predominantly male,” she said, referring to the Vienna Philharmonic. “I absolutely accept that they are making progress.”

The problem in classical music boils down to gender roles: what society and tradition allowed women to do, and how those roles endured.

Europe has recognized female musicians for at least three centuries — mainly pianists, harpists and vocalists.

Clara Schumann (1819-96), one of the most famous pianists of her time, composed her first piano concerto at age 16, performing it at the Leipzig premiere.

For the most part, however, women performed in private, not in public, except in all-female ensembles; the world’s first women’s orchestra was formed in Berlin in 1898.

Even in the United States, which was far less hidebound in terms of musical tradition, it was not until 1930 that an orchestra, in this case the Philadelphia Orchestra, hired a woman in a tenured position.

Entire sections of the orchestra remained male because their instruments were considered unladylike.

The cello was deemed indecorous because it had to be placed between a player’s legs.

Flutes and horns were thought to make a woman’s face look funny; percussion instruments were viewed as exclusively male.

But change does appear to be afoot in Austria. In September, Marin Alsop, an American, became the first female chief conductor of the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra.

By her own admission, she would not have been given the job a decade ago.

The Radio Symphony Orchestra “really own, and are accountable for, the fact that they’ve been extraordinarily conservative, almost to the point of absurdity, in terms of gender equality,” she said in an interview this month.

“They are extraordinarily open to the idea of righting this wrong.”"

[foreskinniest]

So there’s this cute Austrian guy who wants to take me to the vienna philharmonic concert but I feel like that’s too upper class for me. I want, no, need your advice.

Go to the fancy concert, the man clearly has money and class. I don't even know what else there is to do in europe besides getting drunk in shitty bars and pissing on each other "as a laugh, m8." It's either orchestras and museums or killing each other over fútbol

[rastronomicals]

6:57 AM EDT September 19, 2024:

Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra -   "The Ride Of The Valkyries (Richard Wagner)" From the Soundtrack album Apocalypse Now OMPST (1979)

Last song scrobbled from iTunes at Last.fm

[consult-sherlockholmes]

Whats the first thing youre doing in the new year?

Watching the New year's day concert by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra on BBC Two. Or did you mean something else? At least that's what I am doing right now.

[posttexasstressdisorder]

Saturday, 11-23-24, 7pm Pacific

'Evenin' everyone, Mr. Baggins back with a set to soothe your achin' nerves and help ease us all into a good night. Let's start this evening off with Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 4, BWV 1049; we hear the classic Karl Ristenpart recording from 1960.

I thought we might listen to another of the Dvorak Symphonies conducted by Istvan Kertesz; this is the Symphony No. 7 in D minor Op. 70., performed by Istvan Kertesz and The London Symphony. Stunning performance by all, recorded in the mid-'60s, remastered in 2017.

And now let's hear Dvorak's seldom-recorded Piano Concerto in G-minor, Op. 33, performed by Rudolf Firkusny, with George Szell and The Cleveland Orchestra, recorded in April of 1954.

Now here's one of Britain's 20th Century masterpieces, Gustav Holst's The Planets, Op. 32. Here is Sir Adrian Boult with The London Philharmonic Orchestra, recorded in '79.

I thought we might dip a toe into the Symphonies of Ralph Vaughan Williams this evening, with his Symphony No. 3, his Pastoral Symphony. Andre Previn leads the London Symphony Orchestra, with soprano Heather Harper.

Gustav Mahler was truly a "modern" composer in the sense of being somewhat of an acquired taste for a lot of folks. He wrote symphonies which ran the spectrum as far as orchestral and choral forces required to perform them! Some of these works are just naturally going to be inaccessible to a lot of folks. Among the MOST accessible of Mahler's symphonies are No. 1 (nicknamed "The Titan") and No. 4, which ends with the song "A Child's View Of Heaven", sung by either a child singer, or a soprano, depending on conductor temperment or singer availablility. Let's hear Mahler's Symphony No. 1 in D Major, "The Titan", played by Mahler's biggest cheerleader in the latter half of the 20th Century, Leonard Bernstein and the NYPO.

Let's hear, as a rare encore treat, two songs by Mahler for soprano and orchestra, sung by the divine Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, with Bruno Walter and The Vienna, at Walter's Farewell Concert in 1960. First is "No. 4. Ich atmet' einen linden Duft":

And "No. 5. Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen"

Here is a wonderful little overture by Mendelssohn, his "Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage", Op. 27. The London Symphony is conducted here by Sir John Elliot Gardiner.

And that wraps up this evening's program; I do hope you have enjoyed the selections and maybe heard something new to your ear. This Mr. Baggins signing off for the evening. I'll return at 8am Pacific with Morning Coffee Music.

Until then, dream sweet dreams, babies, dream sweet dreams.

Baggins out.