Strauss: An Alpine Symphony album review – monumental work’s mystic vision guides Petrenko

RPO/Petrenko
(Harmonia Mundi)
Vasily Petrenko and the Royal Philharmonic’s take on Strauss’s tone poem is full of darkness and light, with an impressionist’s eye for details

This is the third recording of Richard Strauss’s monumental tone poem to appear in the last year, and in some respects the most interesting. Vasily Petrenko and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra adopt an expansive view, taking three minutes longer to clamber up and down the composer’s musical mountain than Edward Gardner or Nicholas Collon’s recent recordings. And yet nothing here seems to drag its feet.

The natural world through which the intrepid hikers pass may be the emphasis of the ascent, but it’s the mystic vision and elegy on the summit where the conductor’s focus lies – that and the uneasy darkness into which Strauss’s day of thrills and spills ultimately descends.