This is a magnificent record. The Weimar Staatskapelle are rare visitors to disc, but they are a top-class orchestra, with superb strings which sound overwhelmingly, sensuously beautiful in the opening 'Night' and 'Sunrise' sequences.
The warm and spacious acoustic of the Weimarhalle helps; reminiscent of the Lukaskirche in Dresden, where the Staatskapelle there made their famous analogue Strauss recordings under Kempe. This disc is in that same league of excellence.
Indeed, conductor Antoni Wit must take a lion's share of the credit for the success of this mountain-climb.
His tempi are spacious but his pacing is not consistently slow. It is during the vistas that Wit takes his time to overwhelm us with the beauty of what his orchestra are describing, the 'Entry into the Forest', dallying a little 'On the Alpine Pasture' and, most telling of all, the burst of radiance on reaching the summit. Then on the way down there is a storm, thunderously captured, but in the calm before it breaks, Wit creates an almost sinister atmosphere of apprehension.
As Strauss's descent nears its end and the music winds down, Wit manages a wonderful feeling of triste, a consciousness of danger experienced and triumphed over, and in that 'Ausklang' the organ steals in magically.

The Weimar Staatskapelle… are a top-class orchestra, with superb strings which sound overwhelmingly, sensuously beautiful.

This is a magnificent record. It is during the vistas that Wit takes his time to overwhelm us with the beauty of what his orchestra are describing… dallying a little 'On the Alpine Pasture' and, most telling of all, the burst of radiance on reaching the summit. As Strauss's descent nears its end and the music winds down, Wit manages a wonderful feeling of triste, a consciousness of danger experienced and triumphed over, and in that 'Ausklang' the organ steals in magically.