The Lucerne Festival Orchestra appears in truly massive forces for this concert: Richard Strauss’s magnificently colorful An Alpine Symphony calls for 64 strings, quadruple woodwinds, eight horns onstage — and twelve more offstage — plus four trumpets and four trombones, two tubas, two harps, organ, celesta, and an enormous battery of percussion. Yet from this gigantic orchestral body Strauss draws the finest nuances as he depicts a mountain hike in 22 scenes. Hunting horns ring out, cowbells chime, the waterfall roars — and the Czech conductor Jakub Hrůša has a marvelous gift for making this sumptuous sonic fresco glow. Strauss was the superstar composer of his era, but in the 1920s he found a true rival in the young Erich Wolfgang Korngold. What might have happened had Korngold not been forced into exile in America, where he made his name in film music? Only in 1945 did he return to the classical repertoire with his luxuriant Violin Concerto. The Taiwanese-Australian violinist Ray Chen performs it here: the Huffington Post calls his playing “drop-dead gorgeous.”
