Richard Strauss' An Alpine Symphony is an Everest of a work. It towers for nearly an hour. With a mammoth orchestra - extra lashings of woodwind and brass, a percussion section stretching to wind and thunder machines and a quartet of harps - it's hardly staple concert programming in cash-strappedtimes. Lucky Aucklanders heard it in 2003 when the NZSO and APO joined forces.
Less nudging than Till Eulenspiegel and less philosophically laden than Thus Spake Zarathustra, it is one of Strauss' best. It deals out triumph (on the summit), terror (the storm), and shimmering delicacy (birds and streams). This is the musical world that Korngold and his ilk would transport to Hollywood in the 1930s, working, alas, with relatively modest studio orchestras. There is nothing modest about Naxos' recording of An Alpine Symphony. After the sheer spirit of adventure that Antoni Wit and the Staatskapelle Weimar inject into the piece, Karajan's classic account is a sedate Alpine tour.
Wit has long been associated with Naxos. His is the baton behind the label's enterprising Penderecki recordings and a line-up of Mahler symphonies.
For Strauss, he leaves his native Poland and works with the Staatskapelle Weimar, which can boast personal associations with Strauss, who was once its second conductor.
Wit takes us to the edge of mysterious cliffs and crevasses and the Weimar players are supremely unfazed. He allows time for Strauss' sumptuous modulations to make their effect, for colours to ring true, and for us to catch quotations - there are enough here to make an argument for Strauss being an early Postmodernist.
If 54 minutes in the Alps is a little rugged, there are gentler joys in a disc from the Maggini Quartet, best known for its fearless forays into Peter Maxwell Davies' Naxos Quartets.
John Ireland's two quartets are early works, and echo 19th century masters, but they are crisply delivered and richly captured by producer Andrew Walton with an interval bonbon in the form of Ireland's own arrangement of The Holy Boy.
You can put down your mountaineering gear and enjoy those Sussex downs in the comfort of your lounge.
* Strauss, An Alpine Symphony (Naxos 8. 557811), John Ireland, String Quartets (Naxos 8.557777)
