Climb Every Mountain

This disk features Richard Strauss specialist Christian Thielemann conducting the Wiener Philharmoniker in Eine Alpensinfonie and the Rosenkavalier Suite. The conductor and orchestra are ideally suited to this repertoire but some may find the dish a little too rich and sickly. I have found my reaction to the music of Strauss changing since I first began seriously listening to classical music. Initially, the tone poems ( of which the Alpine Symphony is one rather than a pure symphony ) were very attractive to me and a good way into the sound world of the orchestra. I now find the full blown romanticism and political baggage harder to take and best sampled occasionally in small doses. The Alpine Symphony is definitely a finely crafted work though, heavily programmatic detailing the ascent and return from a hike up an Alpine peak with pastorals, sunrises, storms etc. The suite drawn from the opera Der Rosenkavalier was issued while Strauss was still alive at the instigation of his publishers but was probably compiled by the conductor Artur Rodzinski. It serves well as a concert piece with many of the waltz rhythms familiar from those unrelated namesakes of Strauss.