Pentatone releases Eine Alpensinfonie, together with Vladimir Jurowski and the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin, in Dolby Atmos and a special vinyl edition in October 2023.
Limited Vinyl Edition Of Strauss’ Musical Ode To Sublime Nature
Vladimir Jurowski’s award-winning interpretation of Strauss’ Eine Alpensinfonie with the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin returns in both Dolby Atmos and a limited 180g vinyl edition to celebrate the orchestra’s centenary anniversary, taking place in late October 2023.
The Alpine Symphony was inspired by the composer’s experiences during a mountain trail, and is an audience favourite thanks to its picturesque, idyllic charm and powerfully evocative score. To Jurowski, the attraction of this piece lies not so much in the picturesque, but rather in Strauss’s Nietzschean embrace of living in the now and the transformative power of being in complete harmony with sublime nature.
In that respect, this album shares a kinship not only with Jurowski’s previous recording of Strauss’ Also Sprach Zarathustra (2017), but equally with his acclaimed interpretation of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde (2020), in which he also recognizes a composer coming to terms with the mortality of man while celebrating the immortal nature of Life. Seen in this light, Strauss’ Alpine Symphony becomes much more than just an exquisitely scored postcard.
The recording, first released in 2021, was crowned with an Opus Klassik Award in 2022.
“Strauss’ Alpine Symphony has for me two faces, but those faces are themselves never quite looking where you imagine them to be looking. This unbroken 50 minute tone poem sees Strauss looking backwards to his ‘programmatic music’ ancestors — Liszt, Berlioz, Wagner — and ‘out-programming’ them in the detail and pictorial quality of the depictions of landscape features, climate conditions, the sense of physical human exercise, that on one level the narrative of the work recounts on the route from sunrise to sunset, up to mountain summit and back down.
Also looking backwards, but towards different musical forefathers, Strauss weaves within and around the programmatic path a sophisticated web of traditional ‘symphonic’ motifs and their development, and an overarching structure of tonality that transcends any sense that this is the episodic, free-association musical painting that his compositional sleight-of-hand is portraying.”
Vladimir Jurowski
Digital Release Date: 27 OCTOBER 2023
Physical Release: OCTOBER 2023
Released as a vinyl re-issue and in digital formats for Dolby Atmos streaming and high-resolution downloads.
