'The King of the Waltz' welcomes the New Year
The Strauss Festival Orchestra, on tour in Europe, will stop in Barcelona and offer two concerts at the Liceu.
The Gran Teatre del Liceu celebrates the arrival of 2023 with two recitals by the Strauss Festival Orchestra on January 1 and 9. Made up of top-level teachers and soloists with great stylistic rigour, the group recreates typically Viennese artistic expressions of the 19th century.
The show is inspired by the traditional New Year's Eve Concert held in the former capital of the Habsburg empire, with an attractive selection of the best waltzes, polkas and marches by Johann Strauss.
The Austrian composer, a member of a prestigious family of down-to-earth musicians, is the author of more than 500 pieces of dance music, as well as several operettas and ballets. For this reason, he was known as The King of the Waltz, a dance that enjoyed great popularity among the European royalty of the time.
The production will be accompanied by the Strauss Festival Ballet Ensemble, which reproduces the choreographies and luminous dresses of the imperial court, granting the program a true stage character and making the show one of the most successful New Year's concerts in Europe, with performances in auditoriums such as the Musikverein in Vienna, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the Philharmonie in Berlin or the Hamburg Musikhalle.
In Barcelona, the Strauss Festival Orchestra will perform the best-known titles by the two Strausses — father and son — including Viennese Blood, Spring Voices, the Emperor's Waltz, Champagne Polka or fragments of the brilliant operetta El Murciélago. The most famous of waltzes, of course, will be performed as well — The Blue Danube — and so will Radetzky March, which the old Strauss dedicated to the field marshal for their military victories during the bourgeois revolution of 1848.
Ticket prices to enjoy the Strauss Festival Orchestra and its ballet range from 32 to 75 euros and can be purchased in advance here.