Berlin, 6.12.2024. On January 1, 2025, Maestro Riccardo Muti will conduct the New Year's Concert of the Vienna Philharmonic for the seventh time in the world-famous Golden Hall of the Vienna Music Club. Worldwide, there are only a few concerts that are expected with such great excitement as the New Year concert from Vienna. This year, it is broadcast to over 90 countries and reaches an audience of millions of people.

This massive new reissue from Eugene Ormandy’s stereo discography collects all the Columbia Masterworks recordings he made in Philadelphia between the early 1960s and early 1980s. Sony Classical’s new 94-CD box set once again demonstrates what noted critic Jed Distler, reviewing the previous instalment of this ambitious project “The Columbia Stereo Collection 1958–1963” in Gramophone’s December 2023 issue, characterized as “the Philadelphia Orchestra’s brilliance and versatility as well as Ormandy’s unflappable consistency and habitually underestimated interpretative gifts”.

Roll up, roll up! All aboard the 19th century ZRI celebration cruise from Vienna to Odessa! Our legendary house band are as stylishly up to the moment as ever, reimagining the latest hits by Herren Rossini, Strauss, Schubert and even Dr Brahms with an intoxicating Romani twist!

As in previous years, the Vienna Philharmonic’s 2024 New Year’s Concert has been released by Sony Classical in both audio and video formats. Under the baton of Christian Thielemann no fewer than nine of the works from the foot-tapping world of the waltz and polka are featured for the first time on the programme of what remains the most popular event in the world of classical music.

Operatic powerhouse Olga Peretyatko is accompanied by the Munchner Rundfunkorchester (Munich Radio Orchestra) conducted by Miguel Gomez-Martinez on this high-quality album of (coloratura) soprano favorites. With an able, keen orchestra behind her, Peretyatko is free to demonstrate her considerable talents. Two arias are by opera legend Rossini. One, his "Non si dà follia maggiore," begins the album, and Peretyatko interprets it in a way that leaves the listener entranced. Peretyatko's voice is clean, bright, and full of vibrato. Her interpretation is also highly dramatic.

The music of Johann Strauss reflects a lifestyle, a refinement … a true Viennese tradition. At the same time, this music simply creates joie de vivre, an almost uncontrollable urge to dance. It is these feelings and these emotions Anima Eterna and its leader, Jos van Immerseel communicate with delicacy and conviction; also with a view to the greatest possible proximity to the score as it was conceived at the time of its creation.

The Vienna Philharmonic New Year’s Concert It has long been a Philharmonic New Year’s Day tradition to present a program consisting of the lively and at the same time nostalgic music from the vast repertoire of the Johann Strauss family and their contemporaries. These concerts not only delight the audience in the Wiener Musikverein, but also enjoy great international popularity through the worldwide television broadcasts, which now reach over 50 countries. The concert was conducted by Seiji Ozawa for the first time in 2002 and the light-hearted nature of the event finds this always engaging conductor at his most impishly playful.

“One can share in a more carefree expression of joy here. Many fine conductors have presided over these traditional Strauss tributes, but none with such élan as the late Carlos Kleiber. The music swings and sways in terpsichorean ecstasy. Kleiber appears blissful as he inscribes elegant arcs with his baton, and the players beam.” (Gramophone)

In celebration of the 75th anniversary of the greatest media event in classical music, Sony Classical released in 2015 a complete edition of all the works ever played at the Wiener Philharmoniker’s New Year’s Concerts. Performed in the “Golden Hall” of the Musikverein between 1941 and 2015, the iconic live performances were issued for the first time in a single box set of 23 CDs. Now, in 2020, this edition will be available as a 26-CD extended version, with all the new repertoire from the last five years compiled on three additional CDs.

Even in an age of thrilling countertenors, Max Emanuel Cencic stands out for the heroic scale and brilliance of his voice, his expansive lyricism, and his imagination and enterprise in choice of repertoire. Cencic has excelled as both a soprano and a mezzo-soprano, and Fantastic Cencic showcases his extraordinary interpretative range – from the great and lesser-known masters of the Baroque to the bel canto of Rossini and composers of the Romantic era from Schubert to Strauss. The third of these three CDs comprises recordings from the early 1990s, shortly after Cencic left the Wiener Sängerknaben, which are released here for the first time.

Pianist Rudolf Buchbinder’s latest album, Soirée de Vienne, features music by Beethoven, Chopin, Schubert, Schumann and Strauss and celebrates his home city. The recording captures both the lost world of salon soirées and Vienna’s legendary attitude to life, with its heady blend of intensity and insouciance, earthiness and beauty.

‘A dancer’s blood runs in my veins’ announces the heroine of Léhar’s Giuditta in the beguiling bolero-cum-waltz ‘Meine Lippen, sie küssen so heiß!’ which blazes into life around fifteen minutes into today’s Recording of the Week from Egyptian soprano Fatma Said, the Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo and special guests including lutenist David Bergmüller, Quinteto Ángel and the vision string quartet.

This Sony-made 30CD classical music collection covers almost all classical music, from the early Baroque period represented by Bach to the schools of classical music by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms represent romantic, national and even modern musical schools led by Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Dvorak, Tchaikovsky, Chopin, etc. representative, everything wonderful and vivid.

The operetta Die Fledermaus is Johann Strauss' most brilliant and best-known stage work. It's a glittering comedy packed with Viennese music that has become a firm favourite in opera houses all over the world. A top international cast really have a ball in this highly-acclaimed 1984 New Year's Eve performance from the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in which Placido Domingo makes a very stylish British conducting debut. Kiri Te Kanawa stars with her celebrated performance as Rosalinde, and the charismatic Austrian baritone Hermann Prey is Eisenstein, one of his trademark roles. The cast also includes Benjamin Luxon as Dr Falke and Hildegarde Heichele as Adele.