★★★★★ Welser-Most is captivating and vibrant in the Alpine Symphony with a skilled youth orchestra

Strauss: Eine Alpensinfonie

After years of being one of Strauss's neglected masterpieces, the Alpine Symphony has gotten a number of very good recordings in the past decade, this reading from Franz Welser-Most and the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra among them. I find the work memorable, so it's great to suddenly have a number of viable options.

Opening with the stillness of Night, Welser-Most builds naturally; the climax leading into the Sunrise is fresh and alive. We instantly hear that the youth orchestra is capable and inspired. Their individuality is unmistakable. They play with vividness, delivering a compact sound without aiming for bombast. It makes sense to view the Alpine Symphony as a more pastoral, searching work, and Welser-Most is wise to be fervent without constantly looking to deliver fireworks. The variety of careful beauty is remarkable.

After the natural display of color in the beginning of the work, it's refreshing to hear the Entry Into the Forest played with such tenderness. Yet Welser-Most shows no passivity; for all the attentive balance, there's a great feeling of freedom and spontaneity, a lilt, even. Proceeding through such numbers as On Flowering Meadows and On Alpine Pasture, there's just the right combination of delicacy and forward motion—the pace never drags.

If this performance is pictorial at times, it's never passive. Strauss incorporated plenty of mystery into his Alpine excursion, and as we head into numbers such as Dangerous Moments, Welser-Most is riveting and dramatic. But fundamentally, this is carefree Strauss, with a rhapsodic hue. Welser-Most seems willing to sacrifice sheer thrill in favor of lyrical phrasing. It works, because he is captivating and nearly mercurial.

Quite a bit of the material in the Alpine Symphony is elusive and shadowy, perhaps the reason it took listeners so long to warm up to it. These moments find Welser-Most at his best, since he doesn't view them as mere interludes betwixt the main episodes, a trap conductors easily fall into. The passages before the climactic Thunderstorm are harrowing and full of suspense. Once we come to the actual Thunderstorm, there is an admitted gap between the virtuosity of this youth orchestra and the Vienna Phil under Christian Thielemann. All the same, they play with verve and passion. Welser-Most is more worried about finding musical meaning than creating a big display, and once again, it works like a charm.

Strauss's symphony ends with the repose of a sunset and the ensuing night, and it's played beautifully here. The strings don't have the vibrant immediacy of the best European orchestras. It's played somewhat simply here. The absence of fluff or pretentiousness is welcome, and we end the piece with the same naturalness as in the beginning.

Is this recording a success? Absolutely, but for those looking for their one and only copy of the work, I can't put it above Christian Thielemann with the Vienna Philharmonic or Daniel Harding with the Saito Kinen Orchestra. I'm a bit torn between those three versions myself, and besides, there are multiple recordings I still look forward to hearing. Freewheeling spontaneity may be what enables this disc to stand out, especially with the youth element. There's more detail and virtuosity in Thilemann and Harding's readings. This isn't really a refined interpretation, even if it's sensitive. It's in a more searching mood, but probably not as much as Harding, if more so than Thielemann. EMI's sonics are good, if rather distant at times.

At the end of the day, this reading avoids becoming an ostentatious show, but it doesn't try to sound polite either. It is genuine music-making in the truest sense. I think there's enough variety in Strauss's composition to make it worth acquiring multiple versions, and this CD certainly should be one of them. Freedom and individuality abound; the interpretation never comes closes to relying on detail or sonics for its impact.