C. Kleiber - New Year concert in Vienna [Neujahrskonzert], 1989 [Classical / Operetta / Оперетта, DVDRip]

(b Vienna, 16 June 1909; d Visp, 21 April 1991). Austrian conductor and violinist. He studied at the Vienna Music Academy from the age of nine and won the Kreisler Prize there at 17. His début at a concert given by the Vienna Railway Company marked the beginning of a solo career that continued alongside his orchestral and chamber music activities. He joined the Vienna PO in 1932 and was made one of the orchestra's four leaders by Knappertsbusch in 1939. He remained at the front desk of the Vienna PO and the Vienna Staatsoper orchestra until 1971. He was also head of the violin school at the Vienna Academy (from 1935) and founder of the Vienna Octet (in which his brother, Alfred, played the clarinet) and the Vienna Philharmonic Quartet. He conducted the Vienna New Year's Day Concert from 1954 to 1979, as well as the Vienna Johann Strauss Orchestra, which he re-formed in 1969. He was unsurpassed in his intuitive feeling for the music of Johann Strauss and his contemporaries, and was also much admired in Mozart, whose complete dances and marches he recorded with the Vienna Mozart Ensemble. He made distinctive recordings of several operettas, including Die Fledermaus, Zeller's Der Vogelhändler and Lehár's Paganini, as well as numerous discs of waltzes and polkas by Strauss and other composers. He was awarded the Mozart medal from both Salzburg and Vienna, and the Austrian Ehrenkreuz.