A Strauss Wonder

Some pieces are a slow burn. The first time I heard Strauss's Eine Alpensinfonie it evaded me. It was the famous Karajan recording, the first classical CD ever pressed, and it left me nonplussed. I heard the Symphony live with Dudamel and his overgrown youth orchestra. While I relished the colours and the sheer force of the work, I couldn't think that I would ever love it. Even Andris Nelsons' recording with the CBSO initially slipped through my net, though I was wrong about that... it is a stonking recording. Back when I reviewed that disc, I read that Strauss dismissed the work to the Korngolds as one of his trivialities, which give me a gold-plated reason for not trusting its intentions or its means.

Yet I've recently come to love the piece, from its chilly but promising beginnings, through the almost superhuman achievement of reaching the summit, to the lingering goodbye of the sunset. In those last moments you hear exactly where the Parisfalian sense of space and time in Strauss's setting of Eichendorff's 'Im Abendrot' at the end of the Four Last Songs comes from, as well as something of our struggle to be reconciled with our environment, a theme continued from Also sprach Zarathustra. Far from one of Strauss's trivialities, Eine Alpensinfonie is a real touchstone and I cannot wait to go a-wandering in Strauss's landscape this summer – pictured above, thanks to this charming blog. That said, it may take me a bit longer to reach the summit than the hour-long span of Strauss's musical travelogue.

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