Friedrich Haider, an Austrian conductor with Italian ancestry, trained at the Vienna Academy of Music. At the age of 29 he was appointed as music director of the Opera national du Rhin, Strasbourg. With a repertoire of some 70 operas, he has appeared at leading European opera houses in Vienna, Munich, Berlin, Stuttgart, Hamburg, Barcelona, Amsterdam and Venice. In 2006 he made his debut with the Metropolitan Opera in New York with Rigoletto.

He has conducted the London Symphony Orchestra, Czech Philharmonic and the Camerata Salzburg, among others. From 2004 to 2010 he was principal conductor of the Oviedo Filarmonia, and in 2017 he was appointed chief conductor of the Musicae Antiquae Collegium Varsoviense, Poland’s most renowned period instrument orchestra, with whom he has performed Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, Così fan tutte, Don Giovanni and Bach’s St Matthew Passion.

Haider is an ardent champion of the music of Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari. He has recorded the composer’s complete orchestral works, his a cappella choral works, Geistliches Mysterium ‘Talitha Kumi’, and the operas Il segreto di Susanna and I gioielli della Madonna.

For more information, visit www.friedrichhaider.com and www.wolf-ferrari.com.

The eldest son of Johann Strauss, and not intended by his father for a career in music, Johann Strauss the younger nevertheless established an unrivalled reputation throughout the second half of the 19th century as a composer and purveyor of light Viennese music. He involved his two younger brothers in the management and direction of dance orchestras that performed both in Vienna and abroad.

Stage Works

The younger Johann Strauss wrote some 16 operettas between 1871 and 1897. Of these the best known is Die Fledermaus (‘The Bat’), characteristic in plot and music of Vienna at its most lighthearted. Other operettas are more familiar through dances extracted from them, although Der Zigeunerbaron (‘The Gypsy Baron’) remains second only to Die Fledermaus in terms of popularity.

Dance Music

Dance music by the younger Johann Strauss comprises waltzes, polkas, quadrilles, marches and other works. Among these the most familiar remains An der schönen, blauen Donau (‘The Blue Danube’), originally a choral waltz sequence. Strauss, like his father, was extremely prolific as a composer, writing several hundred dances in various forms.