Merry way to waltz into the new year

Halle Orchestra New Year concert

NEW Year wouldn’t be New Year without a Viennese-style musical celebration.

The Halle Orchestra brought its own kind of Viennese concert to the Bridgewater Hall to ring out the old and bring in the new.

Featuring great music from the Strauss dynasty, Saturday’s concert with conductor Stephen Bell showcased 15 toe-tapping, hand-clapping pieces.

It began with the patriotic “Fatherland March”, co-written by Johann Strauss II and his younger brother Josef, which was quickly followed by the slow waltz-song “Roses in Tyrol”, by Carl Zeller - the most popular number from his operetta “The Bird-Seller”.

Soprano Rebecca Bottone had to pull out on the morning of the concert due to ill health and Jennifer France stepped in to deliver a spirited performance to an appreciative audience - the favourite of which was from Hungarian composer Franz Lehar’s “The Merry Widow”.

The Strauss brothers’ “Pizzicato Polka,” was good fun to listen to – and watch, with Bell several times teasing his musicians by keeping them waiting for the next beat.

The final piece was Strauss’s beautiful “Blue Danube”. It’s unlikely any Viennese concert could get away without including perhaps the most famous of all waltzes.

That six minutes of pure pleasure, the response to which brought Bell back to the stage for an encore, wound up the concert with another ultra-famous Viennese piece, the stirring “Radetsky March”; a suitable end to the concert and a rousing start to a new year.