Rainbow Waltz (arr. W. Dörner)

Program notes

About the Work

The Rainbow Waltz is a charming dance by the American composer Florence Price, heard here in an arrangement by Wolfgang Dörner that adapts it for the Vienna Philharmonic’s distinctive sound. Its inclusion is one of the most striking gestures of the 2026 programme. Price, long overlooked and now widely celebrated, is the first American woman, and one of very few composers from outside Europe, to feature at the New Year’s Concert. The waltz reflects the side of Price’s art that delighted in shorter, genial character pieces alongside her symphonies and concertos, and it carries her warm, lyrical voice, rooted in Romantic harmony but inflected with an American melodic sweetness, into the heart of the Viennese tradition. To hear a waltz from across the Atlantic in the Musikverein is a quietly historic moment, widening a ritual long defined by the Strauss family to embrace a broader musical world.

What to Listen For

Listen for how Price’s melodic idiom differs from the native Viennese style: a gentle, songful lyricism with its own American flavour, even as the triple-time waltz rhythm anchors it firmly in the dance tradition. Dörner’s arrangement, made from a piano original, wraps Price’s tunes in the warm string sound of the Vienna Philharmonic; some scholars have objected that it strays a long way from that original.