New Year’s Concert – Le Grand Tour d’Europe by Von Suppé, Rodrigo, J., Strauss, Komzák II, Ravel, De (2024/2024), Director musical Bertrand de Billy, KKL Luzern, Lucerne, Switzerland

Start the New Year with a joyful and nostalgic musical “Grand Tour d’Europe” from the 19th to the 20th century. The starting point is Spalato, today’s Split, birthplace of Franz von Suppé. He was christened with the much more aspirational, Italian aristocratic name of Francesco EzechieleErmenegildo de Suppe; he lived and worked in Vienna from 1835 and is considered the creator of Viennese operetta. Not far from there, in Baden near Vienna, was based Karel Komzák II – the ingenious conductor of the Imperial and Royal Infantry Regiment No. 84, which spent the summer in Baden playing for the holidaymakers – and especially perhaps for the young Viennese beauties. Richard Strauss, his Bavarian contemporary,composed “Till Eulenspiegel” not for spa concerts, but for the world’s prestigious concert halls. Written “in the old picaresque manner and set for large orchestra”, it is a witty and cheerful orchestral rondo with a single goal, as the composer confessed: “I wanted the people in the concert hall to really laugh for once.” And indeed, they do so heartily to this day. In his “Concierto di Aranjuez“, Joaquín Rodrigo takes his audience to the spring residence of the Spanish kings on the heights of New Castile, and the music evokes the atmosphere of the court at the turn of the 19th century. Leading us into the time after the First World War, Ravel’s “La Valse” is both an apotheosis and a final swan song to the traditional Viennese waltz from a bygone era.