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
Prêtre. 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.
