RICHARD STRAUSS Eine Alpensinfonie
LSO Live SACD LSO0689
Strauss’s last great tone poem has never fared particularly well on disc and is notoriously difficult to bring off successfully in the concert hall. Consequently, Bernard Haitink would seem to be starting his ascent of the Alpine peaks facing a pretty precipitous rock face even before he’s had a chance to sharpen his pitons; this disc was recorded live in London’s Barbican Centre in June 2008.
Since it appeared in 2006 the Naxos recording has been most critic’s favourite, and while I don’t slather over it quite so enthusiastically as some, I do agree that it is the best on the slopes at the moment. Its clear weaknesses, however, are Antoni Wit’s somewhat uneven approach to the climb, with moments when he seems to lose focus, and the Weimar Staatskapelle’s sturdy but not always secure grasp of the techniques required to master such an awesome climb. They do well, but the strain shows more than once.
Straight off, with Haitink leading a party of such highly accomplished musical mountaineers as the LSO, there’s no doubt that he knows where he’s going and there is no question that the LSO can cope with every obstacle in its path – even those ‘Precarious moments’, nerve-wracking as they are for a while, never really give the impression that we are not going to reach the summit, and the sliding about ‘On the glacier’ is more in the manner of an afternoon romp than a really tricky traverse. This is a wholly assured performance supported by some highly accomplished orchestral playing; the LSO violins find that perfect balance between over-sentimentalising and discretion as the climbers are ‘Entering the forest’, and when we do reach The Summit the oboe sounds suitably awe-struck before the LSO brass weigh in with their moment of blazing triumph.
Haitink’s clear sense of purpose and the fine LSO playing are not, sadly, enough, to put this Alpine Symphony among the front-runners. It is let down by the engineering and, curiously, by the location itself. The off-stage hunting party, heard as the rest of the orchestra make ‘The ascent’, is so obviously artificially muffled that it sounds simply weird, the cow bells make a strangely tinny sound (tinned milk rather than the fresh stuff to be found ‘In the mountain pasture’), the wind machine is recessed so far that it sounds like an asthmatic in the audience, and as for the organ, words would fail me if it wasn’t my job to find them. Here’s the worst kind of electronic noise, dismembered, characterless and with a dead lump of bass instead of resonant pedal pipes, the soft tones no better than an air-conditioning unit humming in the background. Strauss knew what he wanted, and it certainly wasn’t this.
If conductors feel that they can skimp on the organ – especially where it plays such a vital role – where will they stop? Synthesised violin sound, computerised trumpet notes, electronic percussion? The organ-less Barbican should rule itself out as a realistic venue for a live performance of the Alpine Symphony; it certainly defies comprehension that it should be used as the setting for a commercial recording of the work.
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