Arnold Schoenberg (1875-1951)
Verklärte Nacht (1946 version for string orchestra)
Richard Strauss (1864-1949)
Eine Alpensinfonie (1915)
Wiener Philharmoniker/Christian Thielemann
rec. live 2023, Musikverein, Vienna
Picture format: 16:9; Sound format: PCM Stereo/DTS 5.1; Region code: 0 (worldwide)
The Exclusive Subscription Concert Series
C Major DVD 766908 [89]

I jumped at the chance to experience this DVD because it contained the Vienna Philharmonic, one of the world’s greatest orchestras, playing Strauss’s Alpine Symphony one of my favourite pieces, under Christian Thielemann, one of Strauss’s greatest interpreters. What’s not to like?

Well, nothing, but it turns out there isn’t much to get excited about either. This performance of Eine Alpensinfonie is distinctly cursory, like a read-through rather than an exhilarating event or a polished final product. The first five minutes feel oddly rushed, so that there is no sense of mystery or anticipation to the opening scenes of night and sunrise. That rubs off onto the rest of the performance, with a climb that’s uncomfortably rapid, and a storm scene that makes a fair racket but that subsides down into a pretty ordinary rendering of the final pages; no mystical vision here.

The playing is superb, of course, and the solos are predictably excellent, particularly the principal oboe and principal horn, whose close-ups and final ovations are well-earned. There is heft aplenty, too, and Thielemann occasionally confirms that he knows what he’s doing, slowing up impressively for the arrival on the summit where we at last get the chance to look around and enjoy our surroundings. Otherwise it’s fascinating to see just how little he moves on the podium, conducting even the largest of climaxes with little more than a flick of his wrist or a twitch of his eyebrows. Nothing wrong with that, of course, and an orchestra like this could do it even if there was no one at all on the podium, but it’s overall a disappointingly lacklustre reading. A few times I thought that if I’d gone to Vienna to hear it, then I’d have gone home disappointed.

Verklärte Nacht is much better, sounding drop-dead gorgeous in its 1946 version for full orchestra which, when played by this body of strings, sounds ravishingly, almost dangerously beautiful. The opening tread begins quietly, but it’s already clear you’re in the presence of some of the classiest string playing around, and it builds up to a climax that provides a warm bath of sound you’d happily drown in. The turn to the major, as the man in the poem accepts the woman, is heart-meltingly gorgeous and, as it moves towards the final transfiguration, every flicker and grace note is perfectly articulated and gorgeously delineated.

So that’s worth hearing, as well as seeing, but if you want an Alpine Symphony on film then you’d be far better with Thielemann’s Dresden performance for the Strauss anniversary in 2014. It looks and sounds great, and even though it’s just as fast as this one it’s much more gripping; a result of the conductor being on his home territory, perhaps?

Simon Thompson

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