Search - Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra :: Strauss: Alpine Symphony

For the Strauss year of 2014, the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks under the baton of Franz Welser-Moest, a popular guest conductor of the orchestra for 25 years now presents a selection of works focusing on the two most important genres in the oeuvre of Richard Strauss: the symphonic poem and the opera. These are represented by his ""Alpine Symphony"" as well as the four symphonic interludes from his 1924 opera ""Intermezzo"". The lightweight and entertaining music of this ""bourgeois comedy"" contrasts starkly with the poetic and powerfully sonorous symphonic treatment given to its four interludes. These were transferred by Strauss from the opera to the concert hall, where they are still firmly established today. For Richard Strauss, writing poetry in tones was a central artistic credo. What Beethoven, Berlioz and Liszt had begun was perfected in the Munich-born composer's great tone poems: ""Don Juan"", ""Till Eulenspiegel"", ""Thus Spake Zarathustra"", and his final work of symphonic programme music ""An Alpine Symphony"", completed in 1915. In this work, which is a summit in the musical depiction of nature in its own right, Strauss sends the listener on a tour through the mountains and has him experience pastures, waterfalls, undergrowth, glaciers, the elation of reaching the summit, and also a thunderstorm. Beneath the surface, however, the ""Alpine Symphony"", which Strauss originally entitled ""The Antichrist"", has several echoes of Beethoven and Wagner and especially in the sections entitled Night, Vision and Elegy leads us subtly into philosophically charged soundscapes intended to convey ""moral purification through one's own strength"" and also ""worship of eternal and magnificent nature.""