Vienna Phil to send tsunami aid

Moved by last weekend’s earthquake-tsunami catastrophe, the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra said it would donate $136,000 to the World Health Organization to help provide drinking water to survivors.

“We wish to express our solidarity with all those who have lost everything,” the famed orchestra’s president, Clemens Hellsberg, said Thursday.

The orchestra typically donates about $68,000 to a humanitarian cause each New Year’s Day, when it plays a concert broadcast around the world.

Lorin Maazel, music director of the New York Philharmonic and a former chief conductor of the Vienna State Opera, will conduct Saturday’s concert, to be broadcast by the Public Broadcasting Service in the United States. (It will air locally at 8 p.m. on KCET-TV.)