Great Performances . From Vienna: The New Years Celebration 2005 | PBS
I've been listening to KUNC's "eclectic music" programming via streaming Internet just now, and they announced that they'll be broadcasting the annual New Year's concert from Vienna later this afternoon. I started crying.
Last night at midnight, I was just dozing off when firecrackers and loud "reports" (guns or M-80s or whatever) started going off. It occured to me that 2007 was a year without Mom in it, and started crying.
Yesterday, at the farewell liturgy for Holy Innocents (AKA Holy Moly), a former vicar came up to me, gave me a big hug, and asked how I was doing – specifically, how I was doing in regards to losing Mom last June, because one of the last things he and I did before he left was read some of the prayers for the dead for Mom. I started crying.
Really, I don't spend all my time crying. It's just that New Year's is strongly connected in my mind with cherished old memories of Mom, especially from when I used to go home from Oregon or Washington for Christmas, stay in my old room, and sit up a lot of nights talking. She'd build a fire in the fireplace most evenings, and we'd watch TV and talk and just be cozy. At New Year's, we often stumbled on the annual broadcast of the Vienna Philharmonic's concert on Great Performances, and it became one of those little traditions between us. We'd watch the little interstitial dance sequences that Great Performances would insert so that it wasn't just a straight concert broadcast.
And of course, we'd always clap along during the traditional encorre of the Radetsky March. I have the March on iTunes and when it comes up, I clap along then, too. Quite often, I start crying a little, but not so much. I thought I was more or less immune to it, but may lose it just because of the time of year.
One year I introduced David to this tradition; the live broadcast is picked up by a ton of public radio stations, and it can often be encountered if you happen to be traveling anywhere in the country over New Year's Day, which is what happened when we were enjoying a driving vacation between Zion National Park and the Grand Canyon. The northern Arizona NPR station in Flagstaff broadcast it, so we were able to listen to the whole thing as we drove through the desert landscape. It's NOT broadcast by our local NPR station, because of their stupid jazz. It may be on one of the other local stations that broadcasts classical music, though.
And here it is, the traditional New Year's Concert, conducted by Zubin Mehta, brought to you live by the wonders of world-wide radio broadcast/web simulcast via KUNC… with two announcers, one Austrian and another American doing the translation. It's a little awkward, but the only way it could be done.
It's odd how I had forgotten about this, which is probably why it sideswiped me last night when I realized it was 2007. Even then, I forgot about the concert. It was only when the KUNC announcer mentioned that I realized. And it seems that the technical problems we've been having are going to prevent us from leaving any time soon to see David's parents, so it looks like I'll be here for the duration.
I've got it queued up on TiVo to record the GP version of the concert tonight; Walter Cronkite, bless his heart, is still the host after 23 years and his voice and demeanor are part of the charm. Mom and I must have been watching some of the earliest GP broadcasts together in the mid-Eighties, when I was either still living in Eugene, or after I moved to Seattle.
On another related topic, Mom's little "thought of the day" doo-dad (it was a table favor from a luncheon in 1992) has some interesting notations for the day:
1992 – 158 Buck "necked" January 1
1999 – 145 — Rah!
2000 – 145
2002 – 140
2004 – 139Today is the first day of the rest of your life.
Looks like she was noting her weight down from year to year; I think she meant "buck nekkid" in the one for 1999, and was congratulating herself the next year with a little "Rah!" for the weight loss she managed. The next years, 2005 and especially 2006, her vision got to where she couldn't see to write her little notes.