MSO.LIVE journeys to the mountains in a spectacular rendition of Richard Strauss’s An Alpine Symphony, recorded live from Hamer Hall. Written in 1915, Alpine was the last of Richard Strauss’s tone poems and one of his largest works with an orchestra of more than 100 musicians. Fourteen epic movements chart a climber’s journey to the grand European mountains, taking us through inspiring landscapes in ‘Auf dem Gipfel’, terrifying storms in ‘Gewitter und Sturm, Abstieg’, and mystical meditations in ‘Nacht’. These scenes are conveyed in Strauss’s sumptuous late Romantic chromaticism, with daring harmony and orchestration so inventive that at the dress rehearsal for the work’s premiere, Strauss commented that he had at last learned to orchestrate.
Though it was composed during the horrors of the First World War, An Alpine Symphony is an iconically Romantic evocation of landscape in music, marking the end of an era as grand German works such as this went out of fashion after the war. Experience the inimitable drama and passion of Strauss’s great work as performed here by a jam-packed MSO under Chief Conductor Jaime Martin.
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