AN ALPINE SYMPHONY IN IMAGES
+ KORNGOLD VIOLIN CONCERTO
Singapore Symphony Orchestra
Friday (18 July 2025)
This review was published in The Straits Times on 21 July 2025 with the title "SSO scales An Alpine Symphony, soars with Korngold Violin Concerto".
The Singapore Symphony Orchestra performing music with the accompaniment of projected visuals is not something novel. Back in 2010, the orchestra under Shui Lan’s direction played Claude Debussy’s La Mer (The Sea) with stunning imagery of marine life provided by SSO first violinist William Tan, who is well-known as a diving photographer.
Romantic German composer Richard Strauss’ tone poem Eine Alpensinfonie or An Alpine Symphony (1915), almost 50 minutes, is double the length of Debussy. Sometimes criticised for bombast and self-indulgence, the work has weathered well in concert and on record. Now add some 400 photographic stills on-screen by German photographer / film maker Tobias Melle, himself a professional cellist, the overall experienced is enhanced.
A resident of Munich, his views of the Bavarian Alps near Berchtesgaden, heard alongside music director Hans Graf’s taut direction of the orchestra, made for a visual and aural spectacle. The hall was cloaked in darkness for the opening of this dawn-to-dusk experience in the mountains. The moon, sunlight creeping over the crags and panoramic vistas defined the transition from Night to Sunrise. This early climax matched Strauss’ ambition, if not quite as memorable as the corresponding sequence in his earlier Also Sprach Zarathustra.
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| Photo: Chris P. Lim |
The music follows a group of mountaineers from their ascent, through the terrain of woods, waterfalls, meadows (with cows aplenty) and glaciers, encountering risks and doubts before reaching the summit for the work’s biggest climax.
If there were a composer who could vividly illustrate all these musically, Strauss was the man. The subsequent thunderstorm, safe descent and sunset with a return to darkness was no less enthralling. The orchestra responded magnificently, with special mention going to the brass, for its overtime efforts both onstage and offstage.
The concert’s cinematic arc began much earlier with Austrian composer Wolfgang Erich Korngold’s Violin Concerto (1947) which began SSO’s season opener. One of the most popular 20th century violin concertos, it was famously premiered by great Lithuania-born virtuoso Jascha Heifetz with music drawn from four of Korngold’s Hollywood movie scores.
It did not matter whether these films - Another Dawn (1937), Juarez (1939), Anthony Adverse (1936) and The Prince and the Pauper (1937) – have more or less been forgotten, as the music lives on in this masterpiece. The sumptuous melodies and lush scoring through its three movements was well realised by the orchestra and young Swedish violinist Daniel Lozakovich.
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| Photo: Chris P.Lim |
His is not a fire-breathing virtuosity which gets in your face, but one more intimate and subtle. As such, there were moments in the first and third movements where he risked being overwhelmed, despite the restrained accompaniment kept on a tight leash. There were no worries, however, in the slow movement’s Romance, where his refined and sweet tone clearly shone through.
As if to make up for an earlier reticence, his generous and no-holds-barred encore of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Fugue from the unaccompanied Violin Sonata No.1 in G minor (BWV.1001) showed where his sympathies truly lay.
Another review of the concert on Bachtrack.com:
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