Memorable Christmas and New Year´s concerts - and a tribute to Brian Large

The Christmas season gives television viewers a wonderful opportunity to watch and listen to many of the best orchestras play in some of the most beautiful venues for music making. Fortunately, several of the main European television channels continue the fine tradition of televised Christmas and new year´s concerts. This holiday season I watched primarily the concerts broadcast by German channels, and  I have to say that they were impressive! Almost all concerts were in HD quality, which brings marvelous clarity and colour to even the smallest details.

For me this Christmas concert “season” began with a concert broadcast from the Frauenkirche in Dresden. It was very moving to see this magnificently rebuilt church filled with great music.

Another of my favorite concerts was also broadcast from Dresden - the new year´s gala from the beautiful Semper Oper. The Staatskapelle Dresden was conducted by its talented new chief conductor Christian Thielemann.

How fortunate they are in Dresden to have two such beautiful venues for this kind of events!

The concert from the Teatro La Fenice in Venice was still another highlight of the season. Also here it was wonderful to see how beautifully the theater has been rebuilt after the devastating fire in 1996.

Last, but not least, the most famous of all seasonal concerts, the Vienna Philharmonic new year´s concert, this time conducted by Franz Welser-Möst. What a wonderful concert it was! It had everything you expect from a Viennese festive gala. You can see and feel that the orchestra loves to play these familiar pieces. And at least I cannot think of any other concert venue as beautiful and acoustically perfect as the Musikverein. This year the ballet numbers were also unbelievably beautifully done. The winter pictures (from Castle Laudon?) were unbelievable!

But I would like to add one more reason why the Viennese concert was so successful: The director for the televised programme was Brian Large, in my opinion the leading classical music television director in the world. It is easy to forget the importance of the director – often viewers only notice a name quickly disappearing in the end of the programme. But for a concert or opera performance to be truly great on television or DVD, the role of the director is without question crucial. A good director has of course to know the music extremely well and in addition understand how it should be conveyed visually to the millions of viewers watching all over the world. Not an easy combination! Brian Large does it with great confidence and style, without resorting to any cheap tricks so often seen in this kind of broadcasts. One must hope that he has some good apprentices who will be able to continue his good work at some later stage!