Strauss, R: Eine Alpensinfonie, Op. 64 (An Alpine Symphony)

The São Paulo Symphony Orchestra under Frank Shipway – an expert in late-Romantic Austro-German repertoire – here perform two vast and enormously colourful works by Richard Strauss.

The Alpine Symphony is a symphonic poem and is the last in a series of works that includes such masterpieces as Don Juan, Also sprach Zarathustra and Ein Heldenleben. The work is divided into 22 sections that flow in an unbroken sequence, marking the ascent and descent of the mountain, from before sunrise to after sunset. The work makes use of Strauss’ entire repertoire of orchestral pictorialism.

The opera Die Frau ohne Schatten, used an even more opulent orchestration than the Alpine. It wasn’t until 1946 that Strauss, in his 82nd year, returned to the score in order to make his Symphonic Fantasy, based on highlights from the opera.

Kurt Masur is well known to London audiences as Principal Conductor of the London Philharmonic from 2000-2007. In September 2002, Mr. Masur became Music Director of the Orchestre National de France and from the beginning of the 2008/2009 season he assumed the title of Honorary Music Director for Life. Now, aged 82, he has commenced a new association with the Philharmonia Orchestra appearing as recently as February this year at the RFH. However he appears here with his ‘own’ orchestra, with whom he has made many successful recordings for Naïve, in Strauss’ mountain tale inspired by family snowfights at his home in Garmisch.

LSO Live is thrilled to welcome Bernard Haitink back for his first recording with the LSO since his internationally acclaimed Beethoven cycle in 2006. Eine Alpensinfonie was recorded in June 2008 during Haitink’s Strauss/Mozart series with the LSO. In his Alpine Symphony Strauss recounts an attempt to conquer the summit of an Alpine mountain. He infuses the score with numerous instrumental colours and rich combinations of sounds, evoking the images and events that take place on the trek. It was to be one of his final large-scale orchestral works and shows the last great German Romantic composer at the pinnacle of his art. Haitink has also recorded Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde with the LSO and soloists Christianne Stotijn and Anthony Dean Griffey for release on LSO Live later in 2010. He will conduct the Royal Concergebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam during early-2010 followed in June 2010 by a complete Beethoven symphony cycle in concert with Chicago Symphony Orchestra. LSO Live’s other recent releases include Prokofiev’s complete score for the ballet Romeo & Juliette conducted by Valery Gergiev. In March the label releases Gergiev’s recording of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony.

“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

“He avoided the fashionable temptation to treat the vast score as an exercise in postmodern irony and presented it straightforwardly as a piece of tremendous late Romanticism” The Guardian

Kempe had not conducted the Alpine Symphony before and a Royal Festival Hall performance (in April 1966) preceded the recording which, after prodigious booking efforts to secure the extra number of brass players needed, was made in a very short time (and in normal working hours) at London’s Kingsway Hall. The sessions are particularly well remembered by conductor Elgar Howarth who had recently, and rather reluctantly, become the RPO’s first trumpet (“it meant that I would have to practice!”) – and was immediately faced with “one of the real frighteners in the repertoire, with high, loud and difficult solos, especially that chromatically slippy passage in On the glacier”. However, the only real problem that Howarth recalls in the sessions for the Alpine Symphony was keeping the organ in tune. The horn player Alan Civil (1929-89) was famously cynical about many conductors. On his stand he would keep a complete pocket score of the work he was rehearsing – and was known to make musical points from it to conductors he felt were lacking in talent or detail. Rudolf Kempe, however, was one of the conductors (along with Beecham, Karajan and Klemperer) that Civil especially admired. Indeed, when Kempe moved in 1975 from the RPO to the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Civil thought it would be the start of a golden age for the orchestra, an important antidote to the modern, what he sometimes called ‘contemptible’ music which the orchestra regularly programmed in the Glock era. When Kempe died in early 1976 Civil was immensely disappointed. Civil had been one of the two most famous pupils of the legendary Royal Academy of Music horn professor Aubrey Brain, father of the equally legendary Dennis Brain, alongside whom he played in wartime military bands, and the early days of Beecham’s RPO and the Philharmonia. By universal approval, Civil moved up from third horn to inherit Dennis Brain’s principal chair at the Philharmonia’s recording sessions for Strauss’s Capriccio after Brain was tragically killed on 1 September 1957. “I don’t use the word great very often,” says horn player, conductor and professor Michael Thompson, “but Alan Civil was a great horn player.” Excerpt from the note, © Mike Ashman, 2008

Zubin Mehta's LAPO recording of Strauss's Sinfonia Domestica has long been considered a benchmark and after a considerable absence from the catalogue reappears here, coupled with the later Parergon for piano (left hand) and orchestra. Equally celebrated is Mehta's reading of the Alpine Symphony, and the set concludes with one of Strauss's earliest tone poems, Macbeth.