The Alpine Symphony has taken a lot of critical stick over the years but has survived displeasure as all good music will. Like Also sprach Zarathustra, which has been similarly derided, it has a special flavour, a sound of its own, which compensates for those (few) passages where Strauss returns to a worked-out seam. I have never known it more symphonic than it is under Haitink, not even in Kempe's two recordings, of which I prefer the Dresden (HMV ASD 3173, 4/76—nla). While sacrificing none of the work's amazing illustrative veracity, Haitink convincingly demonstrates that it is much more than a piece of musical topography. The storm, for example, which I would normally have conceded is too long and thematically the least interesting section, gripped me in this performance purely as musical construction. As he did with Vaughan William's Sinfonia antartica (HMV), Haitink goes beyond the music's graphic outlines and penetrates to the creative impulse which seized the composer originally.
This outstanding interpretation, visionary and noble, is backed by a recording which concentrates not on brilliant highlights but on a fully balanced and rounded sound-quality to do justice to the superb playing of the Concertgebouw Orchestra. The luxuriant and beautifully flexible strings, with their rich tone in all sections, sound as natural as at a live performance, while brass and woodwind are equally faithfully captured by the microphones. The oboe solo in ''On the summit'', with its powerfully significant pauses, is not only magnificently played but is phrased with immaculate musicianship.
My enthusiasm for this issue—quite simply the finest performance I have encountered—still does not seduce me from my enjoyment of Solti's exciting performance (Decca SXL6959, 9/80—nla), which is entirely physical and makes no attempt to discover spiritual depths in the work. Karajan's typically well-proportioned performance is not so vividly recorded as some of his other Strauss for DG, certainly not so impressively as Previn's extrovert Philadelphia version (HMV). When I discussed this work in BBC Radio 3's ''Building a Library'' I awarded the palm to a bargain-label release from Mehta and Los Angeles (Decca). Haitink would get it now, but not wholly without some qualms.'