BBC Philharmonic: Alpine Symphony

Strauss at his peak

BBC Philharmonic Orchestra
Simone Young conductor
Cédric Tiberghien piano

Robert Schumann Konzertstück Op. 92
Robert Schumann Introduction and Concert Allegro Op. 134
Richard Strauss An Alpine Symphony

Performances of Strauss’s huge tone poem An Alpine Symphony are always worth witnessing, for the sheer number of people required to make it happen. To put on this 50‑minute, twenty‑two‑scene depiction of an eleven‑hour climb over an Alpine mountain, you need over 100 musicians on stage, another 30 off it, a wind machine, a thunder machine and even a heckelphone. It’s Strauss at his epically proportioned best. Simone Young, a conductor renowned for her interpretations of Richard Strauss’s music, directs this Mount Everest of a work.

Before the break, Cédric Tiberghien joins the Philharmonic for two sharply contrasted works by Robert Schumann: the sweeping Introduction and Concert Allegro and the mercurial Konzertstück.