New Year's Day Concert Vienna Musikvervein

Worldwide Ticketing is proud to offer
New Years Day Concert in Vienna - Musikvervein 2008 tickets

Tickets located in the Orchestral Seating Area from Row 1 to Row 4 /
Orchestral Seating Area at the back of the Theatre or
in First row in the Parterre-Logen

We are pleased to advise that we are also able to offer seats in all the above categories for the New Years Eve Concert at the Musikverein, with regard to the actual programme this will not be released until late August or early September the conductor for this years concerts will be Daniel Barenboim .

Daniel Barenboim was born in Buenos Aires in 1942 to parents of Jewish Russian descent. He started piano lessons at the age of five with his mother, continuing to study with his father who remained his only other teacher. In August 1950, when he was only seven years old, he gave his first official concert in Buenos Aires.

Important influences in his development as a musician included Artur Rubinstein and Adolf Busch, both of whom performed in Argentina. The Barenboim family moved to Israel in 1952. Two years later, in the summer of 1954, the parents brought their son to Salzburg to take part in Igor Markevich's conducting classes. During that same summer he also met Wilhelm Furtwängler, played for him and attended some of the great conductor's rehearsals and a concert. Furtwängler subsequently wrote a letter including the words, "The eleven year-old Barenboim is a phenomenon …" that was to open many doors to Daniel Barenboim for a long time afterwards. In 1955 the young Daniel Barenboim studied harmony and composition with Nadia Boulanger in Paris.

Daniel Barenboim made his debut as a pianist in Vienna and Rome in 1952, in Paris in 1955, in London in 1956 and in New York in 1957 with Leopold Stokowski conducting the Symphony of the Air. From then on, he made annual concert tours of the United States and Europe. He toured Australia in 1958 and soon became known as one of the most versatile pianists of his generation.

He made his first gramophone recordings in 1954 and soon began recording the most important works in the piano repertory, including complete cycles of the piano sonatas of Mozart and Beethoven and concertos by Mozart, Beethoven (with Otto Klemperer), Brahms (with Sir John Barbirolli) and Bartok (with Pierre Boulez).

During the same period, Mr. Barenboim began to devote more time to conducting. His close relationship with the English Chamber Orchestra, kindled in 1965, lasted over a decade, during which time they performed frequently in England, with Barenboim as both conductor and pianist, and made tours all over Europe, to the United States and Japan, Australia and New Zealand. Following his début as a conductor with the New Philharmonia Orchestra in London in 1967, Mr. Barenboim was in demand with all the leading European and American symphony orchestras. Between 1975 and 1989 he was Music Director of the Orchestre de Paris, his tenure marked by a commitment to contemporary music, with performances of works by Lutoslawski, Berio, Boulez, Henze, Dutilleux, Takemitsu and others.

Daniel Barenboim has always been active as a chamber musician, performing with, among others, his late wife, cellist Jacqueline du Pré, as well as with Gregor Piatigorsky, Itzhak Perlman and Pinchas Zukerman. He has also accompanied Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in lieder recitals.

Daniel Barenboim made his opera conducting début in 1973 with a performance of Mozart's Don Giovanni at the Edinburgh International Festival. In 1981 he made his début at the Bayreuth Festival, where he has conducted Tristan und Isolde, the Ring cycle, Parsifal and Die Meistersinger.

In 1991 he succeeded Sir Georg Solti as Music Director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, with whom he enjoyed countless successes in all the world's great concert halls for fifteen years. At the conclusion of his tenure in June 2006, the CSO musicians adopted a resolution naming him "our honorary conductor for life." In 1992 he became General Music Director of the Deutsche Staatsoper Berlin. In the autumn of 2000, the Staatskapelle Berlin appointed him Chief Conductor for Life. In 2006 he was named Maestro Scaligero at La Scala, Milan, where he will next perform Verdi's Requiem in November 2007 and a Wagner Ring cycle in 2010/2011, among other works. He also appears regularly with the Berlin Philharmonic and Vienna Philharmonic orchestras. In February 2003, Mr. Barenboim won a Grammy for his recording of Wagner's Tannhäuser and he and the Staatskapelle Berlin received the Wilhelm Furtwängler Prize.

Daniel Barenboim is a prolific recording artist and has made recordings since 1954 for Westminster, EMI, Deutsche Grammophon, Decca, Philips, Sony Classical (CBS Masterworks), BMG, Erato Disques and Teldec Classics International. EMI Classics celebrated his 60th birthday with the release of his recital at the Teatro Colón in 2000 commemorating the 50th anniversary of his debut as well as his performances of the Tchaikovsky First and Schumann piano concertos with the Munich Philharmonic under Sergiu Celibidache. More recently, EMI released a program of Mozart Piano Trios with Nikolaj Znaider and Kyril Zlotnikov. In recent years, Warner Classics International has released the complete Beethoven and Schumann symphonies and Mahler's Symphony No. 7 with the Staatskapelle Berlin, a complete recording of Johann Sebastian Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, and CDs and DVDs of concerts with the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra recorded in London and Ramallah.

Musicians are by definition communicators. In their performances and with their unique interpretation of the music they convey the style and the meaning of a work to their audience. Daniel Barenboim's incisive intelligence, exceptional technique and meticulous musicianship have been at the core of many definitive performances and recordings as both pianist and conductor. He has also succeeded in building a variety of other bridges:

1) A Jew born during the Second World War - and an Israeli by nationality - he has worked closely over many years with three German orchestras - the Berlin Philharmonic, the Staatskapelle Berlin and the Bayreuth Festival Orchestra - in an atmosphere of mutual affection and respect.

2) In the early 1990s, a chance meeting between Mr. Barenboim and the late Palestinian-born writer and Columbia University professor Edward Said in a London hotel lobby led to an intensive friendship that has had both political and musical repercussions. These two men, who should have been poles apart politically, discovered in that first meeting, which lasted for hours, that they had similar visions of Israeli/Palestinian possible future cooperation. They decided to continue their dialogue and to collaborate on musical events to further their shared vision of peaceful co-existence in the Middle East. This led to Mr. Barenboim's first concert on the West Bank, a piano recital at the Palestinian Birzeit University in February 1999, and to a workshop for young musicians from the Middle East that took place in Weimar, Germany, in August 1999.

The West-Eastern Divan Workshop took two years to organize and involved talented young musicians between the ages of 14 and 25 from Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Tunisia and Israel. The idea was that they would come together to make music on neutral ground with the guidance of some of the world's best musicians. Weimar was chosen as the site for the workshop because of its rich cultural tradition of writers, poets, musicians and creative artists and because it was the 1999 European cultural capital. Mr. Barenboim wisely chose two concertmasters for the orchestra, an Israeli and a Lebanese. There were some tense moments among the young players at first but, coached by members of the Berlin Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony and the Staatskapelle Berlin, and following master classes with the cellist Yo-Yo Ma and nightly cultural discussions with Mr. Said and Mr. Barenboim, the young musicians worked and played in increasing harmony. The West-Eastern Divan Workshop was held again in Weimar in the summer of 2000 and in Chicago in the summer of 2001. It has since found a permanent home in Seville, Spain, where it has been based since 2002. Each summer, following their workshop, the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra gives public concerts; to date they have performed in Europe and North and South America, including at the BBC Proms, the Edinburgh Festival and the Lucerne Festival. In 2004, they performed a historic concert in Ramallah, the Orchestra's first concert in an Arab country. In 2006, the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra performs in Madrid, Seville, Peralada, Santander, Cádiz, Brussels, Paris, Cologne, Cairo, Berlin, Weimar and Milan.

Edward Said passed away in 2003 but his partnership with Daniel Barenboim lives on through the West-Eastern Divan Workshop and Orchestra and through the Barenboim-Said Foundation, which promotes music and co-operation through projects targeted at young Arabs and Israelis. In January 2005, Daniel Barenboim delivered the first Edward Said Lecture at Columbia University in New York City.

3) Mr. Barenboim is keen to draw young people to music as he believes they need more aesthetic education at school than is generally offered. To this end, he was instrumental in founding music kindergartens in Ramallah and Berlin in 2004 and 2005 respectively.

4) Mr. Barenboim has reached out, both in relation to his audiences and to opening himself up to new musical experiences. He has programmed contemporary works alongside repertoire from the classical and romantic eras. He has also expanded his repertoire to include African American music, Argentinian tango, jazz and Brazilian music and shared these experiences with his audiences.

In October 2002 Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said jointly received Spain's prestigious Prince of Asturias Concord Prize for their work in founding the West Eastern Divan Workshop. Mr. Barenboim was also named an honorary citizen of Spain. In November 2002 he was awarded the Tolerance Prize by the Protestant Academy of Tutzing, in southwestern Germany, for his efforts to bring Palestinians and Israelis together through music. The same month, the president of Germany awarded Mr. Barenboim the Grosses Bundesverdienstkreuz, the highest honor given to someone who is not a head of state. In 2004, Mr. Barenboim received the Buber-Rosenzweig Medal, the Wolf Prize for the Arts in the Knesset in Jerusalem and the Haviva Reik Peace Award. In 2005, he won the Special Ambassador of Music Prize of Echo Klassik and was named the 2006 Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University where he will deliver six lectures in autumn 2006. Also in 2006, Daniel Barenboim won the Kulturgroschen award, the Peace Prize from the Korn and Gerstenmann Foundation and the Music Prize of the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation. He was the first performer ever chosen to deliver the prestigious BBC Reith Lectures, which he delivered in London, Chicago, Berlin and Jerusalem; they were broadcast in the UK and on the BBC World Service.

THE NEW YEAR'S CONCERT PICTURES

New Year's Concert 2009

The Vienna Philharmonic New Year's Concert 2009 will be conducted by Daniel Barenboim

The Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra's New Year's Concert is by far the most popular of this orchestra's functions, but also Austria's most noteworthy cultural export. Throughout the world the Vienna Philharmonic's New Year's Concert is televised worldwide and is without doubt the most widely seen and heard of all regular musical presentations performed in the equally famous Musikvervein Concert Hall. Reaching an audience of over 1,200 million people since transmission commenced in the Republic of China in the 1990's. Inside Austria it constitutes an important part of the nation's cultural identity. The worldwide popularity of the New Year's Day Concert goes all the way back to the "King of the Waltz" himself Johann Strauss. The historical facts, however, tell quite a different story. Despite the fact that many future Philharmonic members began their careers in Strauss' orchestra, the "Philharmonic Concert Association", as it was called at the time, generally ignored the most charming and "Viennese" music which has ever been written. Probably the musicians did not wish to jeopardize the social advancement they had experienced upon becoming members of the Philharmonic by associating themselves with dance and entertainment music. It should be noted, however, that the Strauss dynasty enjoyed the highest respect among great composers of the day, such as Richard Wagner and Johannes Brahms. The Philharmonic musicians themselves, through several encounters with Johann Strauss, had opportunity to observe the importance of this music and the charismatic personality of its creator, which had enraptured all of Europe

It has long been a Philharmonic tradition at the New Year 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 its contemporaries.

Worldwide Ticketing is pleased to be able to offer tickets for this most prestigious event in the Musikvervein Concert Hall and being a part of a very unique experience.