Josef Strauss Leads Vienna’s New Year Programme for 2027

Josef Strauss’s bicentenary will shape the Vienna Philharmonic’s New Year’s Concert on 1 January 2027, when Tugan Sokhiev conducts the event for the first time. Five works by the composer, born in 1827, feature in the announced programme.

The concert at the Musikverein also includes four works new to the event. Among them are music by Eduard Strauss and Philipp Fahrbach the younger, together with Cécile Chaminade’s Air de Ballet. Chaminade’s inclusion adds another female composer to a tradition whose repertoire has long been dominated by men.

The Vienna Girls Choir returns for two pieces. Television viewers will also see eleven members of the Vienna State Ballet in filmed sequences made at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the historic Amalienbad. These accompany Johann Strauss works and form part of the broadcast presentation rather than the orchestral concert’s entire visual setting.

Some selections carry histories beyond ballroom entertainment. The opening Vaterländischer Marsch by Johann and Josef Strauss dates from the conflict of 1859, while the official programme closes with Johann Strauss’s Éljen a Magyar!, associated with nineteenth-century Hungarian national feeling. A waltz from Tchaikovsky’s The Sleeping Beauty adds a Russian work to the programme.

Those historical associations invite interpretation, but they are not evidence of an announced political message by the orchestra. The distinction is important, especially when the nationality and career of a conductor become part of the discussion around repertoire.

ORF 2’s transmission is scheduled to begin at 11.15am in Austria. The programme brings incremental changes to a familiar format: a debuting conductor, a composer anniversary, unfamiliar titles and returning choral participation. Its central promise remains the orchestra’s particular way with dance music, heard this time through a slightly broader historical frame.