Ten Viennese years

It’s ten years since the CBSO first asked me to write programme notes for its Viennese New Year concerts - perhaps because I confessed my enthusiasm for an area of the repertoire most of my colleagues tend to avoid. I thought it would be easy and, indeed, Viennese programmes are not difficult to write about if they are just the usual parade of Strauss waltzes and polkas with a few operetta overtures thrown in. But 1993, I seem to remember, included a few rarities, the kind of thing you are not likely to find in the average CD collection. So it meant hunting round for them and, having done most of the CBSO’s Viennese programmes in the meantime, I have been hunting ever since. I probably have two dozen recordings of “The Blue Danube” by now - not because I want two dozen recordings of “The Blue Danube,” wonderful tune though it is, but because each one of those CDs contains some rare polka or march or quadrille unavailable in any other way. I have lost count of the operettas I have acquired - Strauss, Straus, Lehár, Kálmán, Ziehrer - just for the sake of one aria in each case. Scores are even more difficult to find. I often have to resort to persuading conductors or librarians to fax me copies of their jealously preserved documents. After ten years of it, however, I am reasonably well equipped and, instead of going into a panic when a rarity comes along, I am beginning to welcome the challenge. I welcome the familiar items too: they are all (well, most of them) irresistible.