Alexander Scriabine: Le Poème de l'Extase pour grande orchestre op. 54
Richard Strauss: Eine Alpensinfonie für großes Orchester op. 64

Philharmonisches Orchester der Hansestadt Lübeck
Roman Brogli-Sacher

SACD

With Strauss’s Alpine Symphony and Scriabin’s Poem of Ecstasy, this CD presents two tone poems that both started out as symphonies, and that at the same time number among the largest-scale orchestral works of their time. Whereas in Scriabin the composer’s complex philosophy of life flowed into his Poème, Strauss was not concerned with mysteries in his last tone poem; according to his own statement, he simply wanted to compose “like the cow gives milk.” Juxtaposed here are thus two works that differ greatly in terms of internalized and externally illustrative approaches, but that are nevertheless linked in many ways – be it the time of origin, be it their special relationship to the visual. Strauss himself led the Dresden Court Orchestra through his score on 28 October 1915 – six months after Scriabin’s Prométhée was performed in New York for the first time together with the light and color effects. During the composer’s lifetime, plans were made to realize An Alpine Symphony in pictures, namely as a music-accompanied landscape movie. To this purpose, Richard Strauss was filmed conducting in June 1941: he was supposed to be seen in the segments from “Night” to “Dawn”, since the film material at that time was still too insensitive for the natural light of night and dusk. However, the work had to wait another few decades for a realization that did justice to the details of the music.
One such realization – consciously not a universally binding, but rather an individual interpretation – was achieved by the project “An Alpine Symphony in Pictures” that photographer Tobias Melle implemented together with the Lübeck Philharmonic Orchestra for the first time in Lübeck. For his landscape impressions, the concert hall was equipped with a number of projectors, and the musicians’ music-stand lights were connected to a dimmer switch. In this way, the mountain hike, starting at the beginning of the concert in complete darkness, could be experienced musically and visually along the stations predetermined in the score by Strauss, up to the renewed descent into dark night.