Richard Strauss spent the better part of his creative life being accused of vulgarity, and he wore the charge with something close to pride. Eine Alpensinfonie — that vast, ungainly, magnificent panorama completed in 1915 — is the work that most fully justifies the accusation, and also most completely refutes it. Strauss assembles an orchestra of Himalayan proportions, including organ, wind machine, thunder machine, and cowbells, and proceeds to narrate a single day’s mountain climb in twenty-two linked episodes. The result is either a masterpiece of programmatic orchestration or a gilded exercise in excess. Often it is both simultaneously.
What’s easily forgotten — and what Malcolm MacDonald’s perceptive booklet note wisely restores — is that the piece carries real philosophical freight. Strauss had been reading Nietzsche again. The mountain ascent was never merely meteorological.
Frank Shipway is not a name that commands instant recognition in the concert halls of Boston or New York, which is the recording industry’s loss and probably his own indifference to it. A pupil of both Barbirolli and Igor Markevitch — an unusual pairing, that — he has built his career largely outside Britain, conducting on the Continent and in South America with considerable success. His Mahler Fifth drew serious attention. Here he leads the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra, a fine ensemble that has grown remarkably in recent decades, in what must surely have been for most of its players a first encounter with this score.
And yet they sound completely inside it. That matters more than it might seem.
The Alpensinfonie demands absolute unanimity in its great tutti passages — the Sunrise, the Storm, the Summit — and the São Paulo strings produce a richly blended, genuinely full-bodied tone that doesn’t buckle under the pressure Strauss applies. The brass, which can so easily turn coarse in this music, stay round and focused even in the loudest moments. The SACD sound, spacious and immediate, helps; BIS has given Shipway a recording environment that flatters both the playing and the engineering decisions he’s made in the balance.
Shipway takes his time. At just under 53 minutes he runs several minutes longer than Rudolf Kempe’s famous 1966 RCA account — that album was my own introduction to the work, on LP, and its grip has never entirely loosened — and also longer than Bernard Haitink’s 1985 Concertgebouw recording, which remains one of the indispensable versions of the score. Haitink at his best finds the architecture inside the atmosphere; he never lets the episodic structure become a string of gorgeous postcards. Kempe was leaner, tauter, more classical in his approach — less interested in the sensuous surface than in the logic underneath.
Shipway’s temperament lies somewhere between them, closer to Haitink but more willing to linger. The “Ausklang” — that long, valedictory unwinding as the climber descends toward home and darkness — is drawn out with particular deliberateness, and so is the sunset passage that precedes it. Whether this represents interpretive depth or a maestro simply in love with the sound his orchestra is making, I genuinely couldn’t decide. Both things may be true. The pacing never feels arbitrary, which is the crucial test — there’s no sense of willfulness for its own sake — but there are moments where a firmer editorial hand would have clarified rather than obscured.
The coupling is unexpected and welcome. Strauss fashioned the Symphonische Fantasie aus “Die Frau ohne Schatten“ in 1947, near the very end of his life, assembling a concert piece from the opera he always considered his greatest achievement — the one he described, with characteristic immodesty, as his Magic Flute. The fantasy runs about twenty-three minutes and distills the opera’s enormous emotional range into something surprisingly concentrated. It’s a less familiar piece than it deserves to be, and Shipway plays it with evident affection. The São Paulo strings, already impressive in the Strauss tone poem, find an even more pliant lyrical quality here — the long melodic lines breathe naturally, and the climaxes arrive with weight rather than mere volume.
Pairing the most extravagant of the tone poems with music from the most extravagant of the operas makes an obvious kind of sense, but it also illuminates something real: the late Strauss of the Frau ohne Schatten fantasy isn’t a different composer from the Strauss of the Alpensinfonie, just an older one — more distilled, still unrepentant.
This isn’t the first recording I’d reach for in either work. Haitink’s Alpensinfonie with the Concertgebouw remains the benchmark for me, and the fantasy has been better served elsewhere. But Shipway and the Brazilians make a case for both pieces that deserves to be heard, and in the Alpensinfonie especially there are stretches of playing — the storm’s full fury, the eerie quiet of the fog — that would hold their own in any company. A distinguished if not quite definitive addition to the catalog.
