ASCENDING THE HEIGHTS – AN UNFORGETTABLE ALPINE JOURNEY
With its epic sweep and grandeur and compelling drama, there has rarely been such a spine-tingling and vivid depiction of nature as found in Richard Strauss’s magnificent tone poem, An Alpine Symphony. Calling for gargantuan orchestral forces, this lavishly illustrated journey is Strauss’s crowning orchestral achievement. Using a vast musical canvas packed with vivid and exquisite details, it’s a bold, optimistic and passionate work, unleashing ecstatic blazes of orchestral colour alongside moments of awestruck contemplation in a continuous narrative of 22 sections, which Strauss threads together with his usual mastery and aplomb.
The work is performed by the Frankfurt Radio Symphony conducted by podium sensation Andrés Orozco-Estrada. It marks their fourth release in a critically acclaimed series for PENTATONE. Their performance of Strauss’s Salome earned Gramophone magazine’s Editor’s Choice (January 2018). Gramophone also praised their Ein Heldenleben “...the playing has an easy virtuosity … the love music swells and swoons magnificently”. And for their first recording, the Stravinsky ballets The Firebird and The Rite of Spring, Gramophone lauded their ability “to unearth an astonishing amount of detail at relatively spacious tempi” and “PENTATONE’s awesomely precise recording”.
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