What does your first of January look like? A family gathering with recited New Year’s letters? Announcing good resolutions over breakfast in bed? A day off among friends, still echoing with the throb of last night’s bubbles? Wading through the mud at the cyclocross in Baal? Or tuning your ears to Vienna for the New Year’s Concert of the Wiener Philharmoniker?

On the very first day of the new year, the traditional concert in the gleaming Goldener Saal stands as one of the essential fixtures of the musical season. An experience steeped in custom: the hall invariably overflowing with flowers, Katelijne Boon guiding television-watching (and radio-listening) Flanders through the event, Austria’s tourist office pulling out all the stops with promotional vistas of pastoral beauty… and a programme that has remained largely unchanged for more than a century. The waltzes of the Strauss family are inescapable.

Not to worry: at our own New Year’s concert, Happy 2026!, favourites such as the Champagner-Polka, the Radetzky March and Annen-Polka will certainly be there. Yet every year we also like to introduce an element of surprise, and this time we find that distinctive twist precisely within tradition.

Read the programme notes by Jasper Croonen.