After Dark: ZRI – Cellar Sessions

ZRI’s Cellar Sessions is inspired by the cellar at The Red Hedgehog tavern in 19th-century Vienna.

This was where musicians from all scenes would meet after hours, and the boundaries between genres became blurry in tandem with the flow of beer and wine.

ZRI brings the spirit of The Red Hedgehog to life, where a Hungarian folk tune or Czardas dance may give way to some sublime Schubert or rip-roaring Dvořák.

For nearly a hundred years, the doors of The Red Hedgehog – Zum Roten Igel (after which ZRI is named) – opened onto the very heart of Viennese musical life.

The Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde established the city’s first public concert hall there, hosting regular premieres by Beethoven, and then Schubert, who lived next door at one point.

As if that wasn’t enough, the complex of buildings included a bar at the back with a vaulted cellar that later became Brahms’ favourite haunt, where patrons caroused and who knows what kind of musical activities went on after hours.

The original building was demolished in 1906, but the spirit of the great composers feeding off the soundscape of a dynamic and cosmopolitan urban chic lives on in ZRI’s Cellar Sessions.

Schubert and Brahms were both fascinated by Hungarian ‘Gypsy-band’ music and it became as fashionable as the waltz in Vienna, with one of the tunes included here still part of the standard repertory in an arrangement by Brahms.