Vienna New Year's Concert 2008

Adrian Patrut suggested that the New Year's concert in Vienna might be an interesting event to assess. He wrote:

The main event of the first day of 2008 was the traditional New Year's Concert of the Vienna Philharmonic in the Golden Hall of the Musikverein in Vienna. This year the famous concert was broadcasted live for the 50th time, by the Austrian Television (ORF) and the German Television (2DF); it reached via Eurovision the viewers of the entire world. According to estimates in Europe only this concert is watched live each year by several tens of million spectators.

The 2008 program featured a total of 21 compositions (including encores) by Johann Strauss, Jr., Johann Strauss, Sen., Joseph Strauss, Joseph Hellmesberger, Jr., and Joseph Lanner. The concert was lead by French conductor Georges PrĂȘtre. He concluded the concert, according to the tradition, with a third encore, the well-known Radetzky March (op. 228) by Johann Strauss, Sen., being acclaimed with ovations by the audience.

Even though the timing of the concert is immediately after the euphoric period of New Year's celebration, I believe that it would be interesting to observe the answer of the GCP network to such a major event, watched simultaneously by tens of million people.

The main data of the 2008 Vienna Concert are the followings:

10:15 (UTC): the concert begins
10:50-11:15 (UTC): intermission
12.46 (UTC): the concert ends.

I believe that this important cultural event should be monitored for a period of 4 hours, over the time span of 09:30 to 13:30 UTC.

I thought it should not be included in the formal series (partly because we already have two formal analyses for the New Year celebration) but I agreed that it merited an exploratory look. The outcome is positive, although not statistically significant, with Chisq 14502.6 on 14400 df, for p-0.272 and Z=0.607.

Vienna New Year's
Concert 2008


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