For the first time, Yannick Nézet-Séguin will take the podium at the Vienna Philharmonic’s New Year’s Concert. The Canadian conductor, who has long been associated with the orchestra, is the Music Director of the Metropolitan Opera in New York and the Philadelphia Orchestra. In the Golden Hall of the Vienna Musikverein, he will present, alongside popular pieces such as “Roses from the South” and the “Fledermaus Quadrille”, five new works being performed there for the first time – including compositions by the American Florence Price (1887–1953) and Josephine Weinlich (1848–1887), who founded Europe’s first women’s orchestra. The New Year’s Concert is one of the biggest events in classical music; it is broadcast to over 150 countries and reaches more than 150 million viewers.

The annual New Year’s Concert in Vienna has been a major event for more than eight decades, since 1939, broadcast on television and radio. The concert has so far been conducted by world-famous maestros such as Herbert von Karajan, Lorin Maazel, Claudio Abbado, Carlos Kleiber, Zubin Mehta, Riccardo Muti, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Seiji Ozawa, Mariss Jansons, Franz Welser-Möst, Gustavo Dudamel, and others. As Austria’s musical ambassadors, the Vienna Philharmonic sends people around the world a New Year’s greeting in the spirit of hope, friendship, and peace – with lively and carefree yet nostalgic and profound music from the great repertoire of the Strauss family and their contemporaries.