01:00 AM EST on Thursday, December 29, 2005

BY CHANNING GRAY
Journal Arts Writer

Attila Glatz, a Hungarian pianist living in Toronto, was promoting small-time concerts back in the early 1990s. Then he got the bright idea of replicating Vienna's popular New Year's Concert. The idea took off.

Glatz rented a hall in Toronto in 1995 and sold out its 1,000 seats. The next year he took it to a bigger hall in the city and sold 2,800 tickets, while at the same time exporting the show to five cities, including New York, where he has sold out ever since.

Now this year, Glatz's Salute to Vienna is coming to Rhode Island for the first time. Tomorrow night, at the Providence Performing Arts Center, Viennese conductor Karl Sollak will lead the Rhode Island Philharmonic in a frothy program of operettas, polkas and waltzes.

The idea is to keep the show as authentic as possible. The conductors and vocal soloists are brought in from Vienna, but Glatz uses the local orchestras in the cities he visits.

Salute to Vienna is modeled after the annual New Year's Concert broadcast around the world from Vienna's famed Musikverein concert hall. In Austria, big-name conductors are brought in to perform Strauss waltzes, and the show is hosted by the likes of Walter Cronkite.

Popular music

The two shows are very similar, except that Glatz's uses singers and dancers (in the Austrian show, television audiences see dancers, but they are performing in a different hall).

And Glatz sticks with well-known repertoire. In Vienna, he said in a phone interview last week, conductors tend to go with more obscure waltzes the audience hasn't heard before.

"If I did that here," he said, "people would probably walk out. They want to hear popular music."

He said he's added singing and dancing to keep Salute entertaining. This is a show, he said, for people from all walks of musical life.

"The only thing is to make sure the quality is good."

This year, Glatz will be putting on 28 shows over five days, 14 of them falling on Jan. 1. That means he needs 14 conductors, 14 tenors and 14 sopranos who will be spread about cities across the United States. (In Providence, the soprano will be Aga Mikolaj; the tenor is Zoltan Nyari.)

Glatz has done as many as 33 shows grouped around New Year's Day. But the number all depends on what day New Year's falls on.

If it occurs on a Thursday, say, programs can be scheduled from shortly before New Year's Day through the following Sunday, before people go back to work.

Extra day to perform

This year New Year's falls on a Sunday, but many people get Monday off, so that gives Glatz an extra day to perform.

He had hoped to do the show in Boston's Symphony Hall on Monday, with the Rhode Island Philharmonic, no less. But the hall is being converted from a pops venue with tables and seasonal decorations back to a concert facility. He could have had the hall for Jan. 8, but he would have had to keep the artists around. And besides, people are no longer in the mood for the "Merry Widow" a week after New Year's.

Maybe he'll be able to take the Philharmonic to Symphony Hall next year, he said.

Each year, Glatz changes the programs and the soloists to keep the show fresh. There are only two pieces that are set in stone: Strauss's "Blue Danube Waltz" and his "Radetzky March," the two official encores played in Vienna, as well.

"One year I left off the 'Blue Danube' because I thought it was done too much. Boy, did I get complaints."

Glatz, who graduated from the Franz Liszt Academy in Hungary, promotes a lot of other concerts as well as Salute to Vienna. In March he's bringing the Vienna Mozart Orchestra to Canada, and there's also a 2006 tour for the Budapest Festival Orchestra. (A Jan. 20 date at New York's Carnegie Hall is the closest the Budapest group will come to Rhode Island.)

He just promoted a gypsy orchestra in Europe that he wants to bring to North America.

For Salute to Vienna, he brings in about 120 artists from Europe and contracts another 1,500 to 2,000 orchestra players from North America.

The orchestras are often booked under their own names, like the Philharmonic. But sometimes they are made up of members of an orchestra and perform under the generic name of The Strauss Symphony of North America. In most cases, the generic groups are cheaper.

Glatz said he could have gotten members of the Philadelphia Orchestra to perform for less than the Rhode Island Philharmonic.

But money is not the most important thing, he said. "We want to keep good relations with the communities."

Salute to Vienna plays the Providence Performing Arts Center, 220 Weybosset St., tomorrow night at 8. Tickets range from $40 to $62. Call (401) 421-2787 or visit www.ppacri.org.