By JC58251
25-Mar-2010

Spectacular performance in glorious high-definition sound  This is a spectacular performance by a firstrate world-class orchestra recorded in glorious high-definition sound. The benchmark Alpine Symphony recording is Berlin/Karajan (DG). Karajan draws a bit more expressive depth from critical moments like ‘Sunrise’, ‘Vision’, the sunset after the storm, and the otherworldly calm of the epilogue; but PentaTone’s rich, vibrant SACD serves the score more thoroughly than DG’s early digital sound. The Pittsburgh Symphony still has a lot of the ripe, vivid, lush tone it gained in the Maazel era of the late 1980s and early 90s, and PentaTone’s engineering team make sure we hear—and feel—its broad, mellow, organ-like tones.

Janowski has been a notable Wagner conductor for years, and his skill at managing large, brassy orchestral forces without losing control—or stifling the players’ enthusiasm— serves the music well here. He is currently the orchestra’s “Otto Klemperer Guest Conductor”; his music-making here makes that title, and whatever honors and awards it brings, well deserved.

Strauss’s Alps are by far too varied and breathtaking a landscape to be encompassed by a single recording. After Karajan, Kempe (EMI) is probably the second benchmark recording everybody should have—we called it “one of the most stirring Strauss discs ever made” in our Overview, and rightly so. Solti (Decca) makes the climb more exciting than Janowski—or just about anybody else, for that matter. Jarvi (Chandos) is tremendously powerful and bracing (and reverberant!), but the Pittsburgh Symphony easily outclasses Jarvi’s Scottish National Orchestra. The sound of the Decca Mehta is quite competitive with Penta- Tone’s effort but doesn’t quite have the clarity.

Lawrence Hansen American Record Guidemore....