Every year, as the days grow longer, Austria gets ready for one of the classical calendar’s highlights: the Vienna Philharmonic’s Summer Night Concert. This event, inaugurated in 2004, brings the prestigious ensemble together with some of the world’s most illustrious soloists—in front of an audience that regularly numbers more than 100,000—in the gardens of Vienna’s world-famous Schönbrunn Palace, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
For this 2009 edition, the storied Vienna Philharmonic invited pianist and maestro Daniel Barenboim to join them in a program centered around a nighttime theme. They begin the show with a universally known work by one of Austria's favorite sons, Mozart's Eine kleine Nachtmusik, before Barenboim moves from the podium to the piano bench for Falla's Nights in the Gardens of Spain. The ensemble continues with Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain, Johann Strauss II's Thousand and One Nights, and more rhythmic works by the Strauss family and Argentine composer Mariano Mores—the perfect nightcaps to round out one of the year's most enchanting evenings.
Photo © Richard Schuster
