Richard Strauss - Complete Tone Poems Vol.4

Richard STRAUSS (1864-1949)

Complete Tone Poems Vol. 4

Eine Alpensinfonie, Op 64

Don Juan, Op 20 

SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg

François-Xavier Roth

rec. 2012-2015, Freiburg, Germany

Extract from the Review of the Complete 5 CD Set

...If the sunrise at the beginning of Also Sprach Zarathustra is pretty spectacular, the opening of the Alpensinfonie, which begins CD4, is even better. Strauss is brave enough to plunge us into musical darkness, which threatens to go on for ever as bassoons and basses grope about. Then the light grows, wisps of fog blow away, and the full glory of the alpine scenery is arrayed before us. (What a film composer Strauss would have been!) On this occasion, though, he is far better able to sustain the inspiration throughout than in Also Sprach. The division of the music into twenty-two scenes, some of them quite short, is closer to the episodic character of Don Quixote, and for this listener, it works very well, as the narrative power of the music carries us from one scene to the next.

Roth once again displays masterly control of the changing tempi, moods and textures, giving a tenderness and tranquillity to the quieter passages, while going for broke in the great tuttis and climaxes. All the essentials of this stunning score are there, with so many memorable moments. To name but a few: that great step-wise descending theme that wafts in at the end of track 7, as if we knew it was there all the time (which in a sense it was, because he nicked it from the Bruch Violin Concerto – but who cares?!); then those vertiginous downward swoops in the violins as the climbers contemplate the thousands of feet of mountain falling away beneath them; the unease of the Elegie (track 17) replacing the glories of the summit; those strange little high D flat squeaks in the oboe – the first ominous raindrops before the storm; and then that storm when it breaks out! This has to be the most sonically mind-blowing of any ever recorded. But it’s not just loud (it is loud!) – all the details are captured brilliantly, no mean feat by players, conductor and engineers alike. The organ in particular adds more to the texture here than I’ve ever experienced before. This is an utterly convincing Alpensinfonie. I am still devoted to Rudolf Kempe’s wonderful account from the 1960s with the Dresden Staatskapelle (available in a 9-CD set on Warner Classics); but this is the one I shall most want to listen to in the future.

Then – after a deep breath to recover from all that mountaineering – comes Strauss’s youthful masterpiece, Don Juan, written, almost incredibly, in 1888 when he was just twenty-four. And it is one of his most perfect works; episodic, describing the hero’s various female conquests, but always with that fatal upward curve of hubris. This is a fine performance, the tuttis hurtling along recklessly, but with exquisite playing from, for example, solo woodwinds and horn, in the beautiful G major episode (track 23, around 6:30)...

Gwyn Parry-Jones (Music Web)