My husband and I have gone to Salute to Vienna every year when we do not get to go to Vienna itself for New Years. It started off as a very upbeat and fun concert, but it has gone severely downhill.
This year the program was just plain boring. One unmemorable piece of music after another. Almost none of the great Vienna music. We watched the TV broadcast of the New Year's concert from Vienna's Musikverien on Jan 1,, and it was SO much better. I don't normally think TV concerts are better than live concerts! Why can't Salute to Vienna play the really great music from Vienna? Even the conductor on TV had so much more personality than this conductor.
The concert felt like the orchestra had already played the great music in previous years and so now is resorting to playing ever more esoteric music. The music is esoteric for a reason - it isn't that good!
Just stick to the basics, and it would be so much better. Blue Danube, Gold and Silver Waltz, Artists' Waltz, two or three polkas, a couple of arias from Fledermaus and Magic Flute, end with the Radetski March, and you are done. All the music would be fun, lively, and in the spirit of both Vienna and the new year. This is a very easy concert to get right.
This concert was way too long. It was almost two and a half hours. With boring music playing, it felt like an eternity.
The ballroom dancers were wonderful, they really gave a great performance. Beautiful costumes too. And the singers were very good also.
The ballet dancers were not so good though. Two extremely skinny girls and one rather heavy one, who inexplicably was partnered with a short skinny boy who just made her look all that much bigger. They had a lot of choreography that they were supposed to do identically, and they never managed to get it right.
There was a guest violinist who was fantastic. He was not on the program so I do not know his name unfortunately. But wow, could he ever play.
I don't think a single person in the concert actually was Austrian, let alone from Vienna though. Everyone is from somewhere in eastern Europe. That is a disappointment. Vienna has a tradition of celebrating new Years that simply cannot be replicated by the cultures of other countries. Vienna is quite unique. Maybe that was why the music choices were off - it seems no one from Vienna was part of the management. It felt a bit ersatz Vienna to me.
Overall, it was an OK concert, but rather boring and with some amateurish dancing. Since there is nothing better playing at that time, you may as well go. But this certainly is not that concert that it could be.