The New Year's Gala Concert given by the Berlin Philharmonic is one of the fixtures of the German music scene, as much as the Vienna Philharmonic concerts are of the Austrian one. This concert from 1996 is typical of the genre, including a selection of highbrow lollipops, a brilliant internationally renowned soloist (Maxim Vengerov) and a generous helping of waltzes with which to swing in the new year. Claudio Abbado brings his usual unflashy savoir-faire to the job of conducting, and the orchestra responds with some gorgeously silky, perfectly executed, if not always electrifying, playing. Vengerov makes Ravel's Tzigane flash and thunder with gypsy passion and gives an equally fiery performances of Brahms' Hungarian Dances Nos. 7, 17 and 21. If the Swedish Radio Choir aren't quite as thrilling in Brahms' Liebeslieder Waltzes and Gypsy Songs they still do a fine job with a remarkably tight sense of ensemble and excellent phrasing. All in all, this is an attractive (if not earth-shattering) performance from one of the world's finest orchestras.

On the DVD: there are no pleasant surprises here. The visual content includes concert shots of the orchestra, choir and soloist in the Philharmonie Hall. There are no subtitles in any language for the choral sections, and the special features comprise two trailers for Cecilia Bartoli's Vivaldi album and a recording of Penderecki's The Seven Gates of Jerusalem. --Warwick Thompson

One of the things DVD can do is capture the sense of an occasion: Berliner Luft admirably gives us the feeling of how it was to be at this 1997 gala in the Unter den Linden State Opera of a reunited Berlin. Daniel Barenboim gives us a mixture of light and very light music; the weightiest items here are the duet "La ci Darem" from Mozart's Don Giovanni performed with charm and energy by Dorothea Roeschmann and Rene Pape, and Saint-Saens' Introduction and Rondo Cappricioso given with real fire by the young violinist Raphael Christ. Much of the rest of the programme is standard German lightweight cheerfulness--with songs such as "Untern Linden", Gluhwurmchen-idyll" and "Berliner Luft"--but Barenboim also gives us a couple of slightly rarer items: Shostakovich's "Tahiti Trot", an endlessly inventive paraphrase of "Tea for Two" and Kurt Weill's celebratory "Berlin im Licht" performed with aplomb by the gravel-voiced HK Gruber. All this accompanied by cutaways of waltzing couples and magicians moving among them doing interesting things with cards and handkerchiefs... --Roz Kaveney

This imaginative staging of Berlioz's dramatic symphony for chorus, soloists and orchestra relies heavily on the moving of massed choirs across a large stage. It has vivid lighting effects--rather too many of them using strobes--and monolithic multi-purpose sets, in particular a revolving glass drum which functions both as cinema screen and rostrum for singers, so that the final ride to Hell, for example, is sung by Mephistopheles and Faust above a cavalcade of projected horses, like the inside of a zoetrope. The three main soloists have voices on a scale that can compete with these flashy production values--White and Kasarova, in particular, sing at a level of intensity that would swamp anything less; the climactic seduction trio has rarely been sung so well or with such an overpoweringly polymorphous eroticism. Cambreling marshals his forces effectively, giving full rein to the work's showstoppers like the "Hungarian March" but not neglecting the subtler less kinetic Gluckian side of Berlioz's vocal writing. The DVD has subtitles in English, German and Dutch, and menus in those languages, as well as French, Italian, Spanish and Swedish. --Roz Kaveney