One block from Carnegie Hall in New York, just visited by the Wiener Philharmoniker (Vienna Philharmonic), is the Seasonal Restaurant & Weinbar.  Seasonal provides a year-round taste of Vienna and is representative of the new generation of Viennese restaurants in Austria and elsewhere that have moved away from the formal, dark, and gilded Habsburg era style to elegant and casual dining.
There is ample reason to go to Seasonal for the food alone but diners should be aware of the unparalleled cellar of Austrian and German wines that co-owners Wolfgang Ban …

The Wiener Philharmoniker (as the Vienna Philharmonic prefers to be called), leveraging a native relationship to the Second Viennese School of music, brought along challenging and thought-provoking pieces by Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern as it arrived at Carnegie Hall this past Friday.
The ensemble was in New York a bit earlier than usual for its annual three-concert series just a few weeks after its New Year’s Day concert in Vienna, one of the music world’s biggest annual events.  The format of the New Year’s Day concert is nothing if not …

Vienna, once the capital of an empire of which it was said that the sun never set over it, is now equally as important as the capital of a newly-invigorated Central Europe that bridges East with West.
Spending summer and winter in Vienna, one notices an entirely different, but equally vibrant, energy.  I’ve been spending time each year in Vienna since my youth.  In 2008, I was in Vienna for a week in June during the Euro 2008 football championship.  At the beginning of last year I returned to attend the …

The 2010 Executive Road Warrior calendar is now available online for purchase.
This calendar captures the elegance and power of BMW’s latest masterpiece, the new Z4. Jonathan Spira was one of the first to drive the new Z4 in both Europe and the U.S.
This calendar includes 13 photographs of the car taken in places ranging from Vienna, Austria to New York City to Los Angeles.
It covers all three models, the Z4 sDrive23i, the Z4 sDrive30i, and the Z4 sDrive35i as well as the art project based on the Z4, An Expression …

The institution of the Kaffeehaus, or coffeehouse, is one of the most democratic public places ever invented.  Similar to the Melange, the most popular kind of coffee in Vienna, the Kaffeehaus offers a mélange of people of all social classes who come together to sit, read, write, and talk – all for the price of a cup of coffee.   Indeed, a guest who orders one coffee can sit for hours at a time reading the newspapers, typically plentiful in a Kaffeehaus and found in special wooden holders that facilitate one-handed …

Vienna, at the heart of Europe, is a city offering a unique blend of the arts, culture, music, and shopping, where 19th century Imperial traditions coexist alongside the latest trends.  One doesn’t have to go far to see a Fiaker (horse-drawn carriage) being passed by a skateboarder.
Tradition is everywhere, from the Kaffeehaus (coffee house) to ubiquitous paintings and photographs of Kaiser Franz Joseph I., the Habsburg emperor who ruled the Austro-Hungarian Empire from 1848 to 1916.
Vienna is one of the only cities in the world with its own cuisine (most …

My all-too-brief stay in the Kamptal (Kamp Valley) was over. I reluctantly left the Loisium hotel in Langenlois around 10:15 for Vienna.
First order of business: top down. The top takes only 20 seconds to retract and it appears far more robust than earlier generation retractable hardtops, which seemed a bit fragile in construction. The interior features generous amounts of space; even with the top up, I never felt claustrophobic. With the top down, which is the way this car is meant to be driven, …

Arriving at London Heathrow’s Terminal 2, I found myself on the business class line with only one passenger ahead of me.  After waiting all of two minutes, I was quickly checked in by the agent, who offered to switch me to a window seat and block the aisle seat so I would have an entire row to myself.  He also invited me to wait in the Senator Lounge near my gate.
BOARDING
Approximately 20 minutes before departure, I arrived at the gate as boarding was just starting.  I was told that business-class …

Austria borders Germany and the Czech Republic to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the west. Modern Austria dates back to the ninth century, when the name “Ostarrichi” (Old High German for “Eastern Territory”) was first used in an official document.
The country is known the world over for its music: Beethoven, Brahms, Haydn, Mozart, and Strauß (father and son) are some of the more prominent names of composers but Austria has more recent musical exports including Falco …

Vienna is Austria´s capital and has a population of ca. 1.7 million (2.3 million within the metropolitan area). It is also one of nine Federal States of Austria, the largest city in Austria, and its cultural and commercial center. It has the tenth largest population in the EU and was rated 2nd in quality of living by Mercer.
Vienna traces its origins back to 500 B.C.E. and was a Roman frontier city, known as Vindobona (“good wine”), guarding the Roman Empire against Germanic tribes to the north.  It was the capital …