Sommernachtskonzert Schönbrunn 2025
Piotr Beczała (tenor)
Wiener Sängerknaben
Wiener Philharmoniker/Tugan Sokhiev
rec. 2025, Schloss Schönbrunn, Vienna
Sony Classical 19802935402 [76]

The thought of sitting in front of the Schönbrunn Palace’s magnificent and beautifully illuminated façade on a warm summer evening and listening to the Vienna Philharmonic performing a concert of popular favourites seems very appealing.  Nevertheless, I am unconvinced by the practicalities of the operation.  A photograph in the booklet that accompanies this CD appears to show many members of the massed audience located a very long way back from the stage.  As such, it’s hard to believe that they would have been able to see very much at all, other than what was shown on large monitor screens.  At the same time, I’d imagine that at that distance they were pretty dependent on electrical amplification and decent loudspeakers to hear the performances in any real detail.  If that’s the case, you might be better off saving yourself the cost of the flight to Vienna and a hotel room.  Instead, you could simply listen to this commemorative CD as you enjoy a tasty Wiener schnitzel, a thick slice of Apfelstrudel and a bottle or two of the finest Grüner Veltliner in the – albeit perhaps not quite so magnificent – setting of your own back garden.

Having thereby already saved us all a great deal of time and money, the usefully informative booklet goes on to point out that the 2025 iteration of the Vienna Philharmonic’s Summer Night Concert memorably saw no less than three debuts.  Conductor Tugan Sokhiev, tenor Piotr Beczała and, much to my surprise, the Vienna Boys Choir were all making their first appearances at the annual shindig this year.

Unfortunately, the 2025 concert was memorable in another and very tragic way, for it took place only three days after a mass school shooting in Graz, Austria’s second city, had resulted in 11 deaths.  As a result, the evening’s programme was quickly amended.  Instead of opening with a rousing overture as might have been expected, it mirrored the national mood of sombre reflection by beginning with the Air from Bach’s third orchestral suite (the Air on the G string).

Several other pieces on the original schedule had presumably been chosen on the basis of their suitability for a relaxed evening concert under the setting summer sun.  Their mood was not, therefore, inappropriate, even in the unexpectedly mournful situation, and so they kept their places in the concert programme.  One of them, Komm zu uns und sing und tanze from Offenbach’s Die Rheinnixen turns out to be melody that was to become much more famous many years later after the composer had recycled and French-ified it as the well-loved barcarolle (Belle nuit, ô nuit d’amour) from The tales of Hoffmann.  Grieg’s Morning mood and the intermezzo from Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana also fitted the unanticipated new circumstances in a relatively seemly manner. 

Though it must surely have at least crossed the concert promoters’ minds to have replaced the remaining, somewhat jauntier items on the programme with more reflectively sombre pieces, they did not do so.  I don’t think that that’s because they worried about disappointing the audience.  After all, the commercially astute Herbert von Karajan knew what he was doing when he recorded the best-selling Adagio (DG 445 282-2) and Adagio 2 (DG 449 515-2), each an uninterrupted sequence of such reflective “pops” pieces as Pachelbel’s Canon, Massenet’s Méditation from Thaïs and Ravel’s Pavane pour une infante défunte.  No, I suspect instead that it was felt that, on this occasion, the Austrian nation needed to express, through the symbolism of music, not only its grief but its simultaneous defiance of terrorism and affirmation that its people remain unintimidated by violence.  Or maybe I’m reading too much into this whole thing and perhaps, more prosaically,three days was simply not enough time to create and rehearse a new musical programme.

Whatever the case, the decision was made that the likes of the farandole from L’Arlésienne, a Dvorak Slavonic dance, Berlioz’s foot-stamping Hungarian march and the bacchanale from Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalila would still be played – and in full-blooded performances too, making not the slightest concession to the understandably prevalent sentiment of the moment. 

Full-blooded is, in fact, a description that’s fully applicable to all the performances on this disc.  Each is played with passion and commitment and, whether or not it was because of the unique circumstances of the day, nothing sounds routine.  Of course, no one would suggest that this is particularly demanding repertoire or that the Vienna orchestra couldn’t play it with their eyes closed.  Nevertheless, Tugan Sokhiev and his players deliver everything as if it’s of the highest musical value.

Anyone familiar with older recordings will know that up until roughly the third quarter of the last century individual orchestras still exhibited their own often quite distinctive “sounds”.  Just a few minutes listening to harshly blaring brass would be enough to identify Svetlanov’s USSR State Symphony Orchestra, while the Paris Conservatoire Orchestra’s distinctively fruity woodwinds were similarly a real giveaway.  While most of those individual characteristics have long since been eroded by the classical music industry’s increasing internationalisation, the Vienna Philharmonic, a band that puts more emphasis than most on its history and traditions, still retains – particularly in the Sommernachtskonzert type of repertoire that features on this disc – a somewhat distinctive sound.  The cause is to some extent practical: its clarinets, for instance, are made, it seems, from thicker-than-normal pieces of wood while the timpani skins come, possibly uniquely, from goats.  But, as its many admirers will readily confirm, the VPO also exhibits its own manner of performing on instruments.  There is insufficient space here to do justice to this fascinating issue but just a little Googling will point anyone wishing to pursue the matter further in some interesting directions.  Suffice it for the moment to say that all the performances on this new disc are simultaneously distinctive and distinguished, exhibiting not only the aforementioned passion and commitment, but a degree of relaxed sophistication that’s coupled with almost tangible sense of delight in making music.

Apart from the orchestra itself, the guest artists add their own elements of enjoyment to the evening.  Although, as already mentioned, tenor Piotr Beczała had never previously sung at a VPO Sommernachtskonzert, his association with orchestra actually dates back almost 30 years and he sounds entirely comfortable in their company.  He understandably sticks to crowd-pleasing material.  Nessun dorma! is inevitably there, along with La fleur que tu m’avais jetée from Carmen and a couple of sentimental numbers from inter-war Viennese operetta.  Meanwhile, just as you would expect, the youngsters of the Vienna Boys Choir – a real piece of luxury casting – sing the Offenbach extract rather beautifully and later provide effective backing for Mr Beczała in Nessun dorma!  No doubt their cutely distinctive sailor suits will have added a splash of visual interest to the film of the concert that has already been released on both Blu-ray disc and DVD.

Sony Classical’s fast turnaround of this concert has actually been quite remarkable.  The music-making took place in mid-June 2025 and MusicWeb had its review copy of the CD by mid-July.  The Blu-ray and DVD iterations seem to have been produced just as rapidly.  That, however, is surely a trifle puzzling.  It is hardly as if the world is waiting for yet another account of, say, the Waltz of the flowers.  Yet, even if it were, is anyone really so desperate to get hold of a disc that links that piece rather randomly to material ranging from the Air on the G string to Nessun dorma!?  While all these individual tracks are certainly well performed and enjoyable enough in their own ways, I cannot ultimately see any real rationale behind this disc.  I can only speculate that its most obvious purchasers will be those people who actually attended the concert itself.  Perhaps some of them would simply like a souvenir of their no doubt enjoyable evening’s experience.  Or maybe the less fortunate audience members who had occupied those positions such a long way back from the stage would finally like to see what all the fuss was really about.

Rob Maynard

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Contents
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)
Air from Suite no. 3 in D major BWV 1068 (c. 1730)
Jacques Offenbach (1819-1880)
Komm zu uns und sing und tanze* from Die Rheinnixen (1864)
Georges Bizet (1838-1875)
Farandole from L’Arlésienne (1872) suite no. 2
Entr’acte from Act 3 Carmen (1875)
La fleur que tu m’avais jetée** from Carmen (1875)
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)
Waltz of the flowers from The nutcracker (1892)
Edvard Grieg (1843-1907)
Morning mood from Peer Gynt suite no. 1(1888)
Antonin Dvořák (1841-1904)
Slavonic dance no. 1 in C major op. 46/1 (1878)
Pietro Mascagni (1863-1945)
Intermezzo sinfonico from Cavalleria rusticana (1890)
Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924)
Nessun dorma!* ** from Turandot (1926)
Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921)
Danse bacchanale from Samson et Dalila (1877)
Hector Berlioz (1803-1869)
Marche hongroise from Le damnation de Faust (1846)
Otto Nicolai (1810-1849)
Die lustigen Weiben von Windsor overture (1849)
Emmerich Kálmán (1882-1953)
Wenn es Abend wird – Grüss mir die süssen, die reizenden Frauen in schönen Wien** from Gräfin Mariza (1924)
Franz Lehár (1870-1948)
Freunde, das Leben ist lebenswert** from Giuditta (1934)

*featuring the Wiener Sängerknaben
**featuring Piotr Beczała