Strauss: An Alpine Symphony (CD review)

Antoni Wit, Staatskapelle Weimar. Naxos 8.557811.

Following his writing a succession of popular, big-scale tone poems like Don Juan, Tod und Verklarung (Death and Transfiguration), Don Quixote, Ein Heldenleben (A Hero's Life), and Also sprach Zarathustra, Richard Strauss ended his love affair with the genre in 1915 with An Alpine Symphony. For some critics, it has always been a low spot in the composer's tone-poem output, no more than a glorified postcard from the Alps. But I have always found it a fascinating journey, and, besides, the writer of the CD booklet notes says it has a lot more intellectual and philosophical substance than most of us were led to believe. Yeah, well, believe what you like, the music still sounds grand.

Strauss began writing the work in 1911 and completed it several years later, devoting his final thirty-plus years mainly to smaller works, songs, and, of course, opera. Supposedly, the composer got his inspiration to write the Alpine Symphony while viewing the Bavarian mountains behind his house, mountains he used to climb and enjoy in his youth. But Keith Anderson in the booklet says it is also about Nietzsche's ideas of the freedom of Nature and liberation from the outdated chains of Christianity, plus something about a marital affair and an eventual suicide. Whatever. I just like the music.

As you know, the piece is the musical account of a mountain climb, starting in the morning with sunrise, ascending through the woods, by a waterfall, across a meadow, onto a glacier, further on to the summit, weathering a storm, and descending by sunset and ending at nightfall. On Antoni Wit's recording, the trip takes about fifty-four minutes, neither too hurried nor too slow.

Certainly, the bargain price of the disc does nothing to diminish one's rewards. Indeed, it may only increase them, knowing the cost is so modest. The orchestra is one of the oldest ensembles, if not the oldest, in the world, founded in 1491. Dang. That was before Columbus bumped into the New World. This is the orchestra Bach played in and that Liszt and Richard Strauss himself once lead. In various guises, the orchestra has been going strong ever since. So, you get a lot for your money. The Alpine Symphony needs a big, strong orchestra like this to do it justice, the work scored for an enormously large group of instruments, including quite a few percussion, an organ, and a wind machine.

Wit makes the most of what he's handed, and if his success in the piece doesn't quite match my own favorite, Rudolf Kempe and the Staatskapelle Dresden, another fine old European orchestra, on EMI from 1971, it surely isn't for lack of trying. The EMI recording is just that much more revealing (especially in its EMI Japan release), and Kempe's hand is just that much more sure in guiding the listener up the slopes. The Naxos recording seems a touch heavier and more beclouded than the EMI, and Wit seems a tad less inclined to open up the music emotionally.

Nevertheless, Wit produces a fine reading, as spacious and panoramic as the mountains themselves. Besides, as I say, for the price it's something of a steal.

JJP