Strauss: Eine Alpensinfonie.(Sound recording review)

Strauss: Eine Alpensinfonie. Franz Welser-Most, Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester. EMI 0946 3 34569-2.

The Alpine Symphony, which Richard Strauss began in 1911 and completed several years later, was to be the last of his big-scale, symphonic tone poems. He devoted his final thirty-plus years mainly to smaller works, songs, and, of course, opera. Supposedly, the composer was inspired to write the Alpine Symphony while viewing the Bavarian mountains behind his home, mountains he used to climb and enjoy in his youth.

The Symphony is really a monumental picture postcard, frowned upon by many of Strauss's critics as lightweight fluff, hammy and melodramatic, but immensely entertaining. It describes in rather photographic detail the climb up and back down a majestic Alpine mountain, with the movement titles telling the tale, among them to give you the idea: "Night," "Sunrise," "The Ascent," "Entry into the Forest," "Wandering by the Brook," "By the Waterfall," "On Flowering Meadows," "An Alpine Pasture," "On the Glacier," "Dangerous Moments," "On the Summit," "Calm Before the Storm," "Thunderstorm," "Sunset," and a return to "Night." All of the events are graphically represented, and while there may be one climax too many, it is all vivid enough to give one the sense of being on the mountain with the climbers and experiencing the grandeur and mysticism of the moment.

My only serious hesitation about the disc was that maestro Franz Welser-Most was conducting a youth orchestra. Was a youth orchestra up to handling so extensive, so widescreen and Technicolor, a production? The disadvantage I foresaw was that ...