Richard Strauss: Eine Alpensinfonie (An Alpine Symphony)

LSO Live’s latest release of Strauss’s monumental symphonic poem sees the welcome return of Bernard Haitink to the helm, his first recording for the label since his acclaimed Beethoven Symphony cycle in 2006. This recording was made in 2008 as part of Haitink’s Strauss/Mozart series held at the Barbican that year and the performance was much admired: “an outstanding performance of Richard Strauss’s Alpine Symphony. Rarely has the long haul to the summit seemed more purposeful. Haitink’s perfect control of the orchestral palette at sunrise and at dusk, as strands of colour rose out of and sank back into the dark monochrome contours, made this performance an incarnation of the music’s own metaphysical struggle and triumph.”, The Times.

It is immediately clear that the glories of the live performance have been captured vividly on disc. From the eeriness of the opening Nacht up to the magnificent and thoroughly expansive Auf dem Gipfel (and down again) Haitink has coaxed every ounce of energy from his musicians. The vision is of epic proportions yet the individual parts are never lost, and the Thunderstorm is truly awesome. The bass sound is especially well recorded and well balanced throughout. The vast dynamic range has been exploited and credit must go to the sound engineers for the excellent production.

This is a captivating performance of Strauss’s classic. Look out for Haitink and the LSO’s recording of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, to be released on LSO Live later in the year.

About the work

Eine Alpensinfonie was Strauss’s last tone poem, composed between 1911 and 1915 and premiered in Berlin that October with the composer himself conducting. It traces a single day of mountain climbing, dawn, ascent, storm, summit, descent, nightfall, across 22 continuous scenes, and its scale matches its subject: roughly 125 players are called for, including an enlarged brass and percussion section plus an offstage ensemble depicting a distant hunting party, making it one of the largest orchestral forces Strauss ever wrote for outside the opera house. He’d wanted to write a piece drawing on his own experience hiking the Bavarian Alps for years before finishing it, and had built himself a villa in that same countryside in 1908 that remained his home for the rest of his life, the symphony is, in a real sense, a portrait of the landscape he chose to actually live in.