THE GAZETTE (Arthur Kaptainis)
Dec 2, 2014
This is a big year for Richard Strauss, a composer born in 1864. It also sounds like a good year for the McGill Symphony Orchestra, which presented Eine Alpensinfonie – An Alpine Symphony – Saturday night at St. Jean Baptiste Church under the baton of Alexis Hauser. There is no bigger purely instrumental piece, or a more extravagantly imagistic one. You need not only plenty of personnel (the count was 110) but brass players who can convey the lower depths of night and the galloping sonorities of a hunting party in the distance. To say nothing of woodwinds equal to the cascades of the waterfall, strings who know what a summit view should sound like and a percussion battery capable of raising the ante of a thunderstorm to something like an earthquake. Happily all these effects were bound by feeling of symphonic intensity. Conducting from memory, Hauser made the ascent and descent seem dramatic rather than merely picturesque. An added bonus was the powerful St. Jean Baptiste organ.
This is a big year for Richard Strauss, a composer born in 1864. It also sounds like a good year for the McGill Symphony Orchestra, which presented Eine Alpensinfonie – An Alpine Symphony – Saturday night at St. Jean Baptiste Church under the baton of Alexis Hauser. There is no bigger purely instrumental piece, or a more extravagantly imagistic one. You need not only plenty of personnel (the count was 110) but brass players who can convey the lower depths of night and the galloping sonorities of a hunting party in the distance. To say nothing of woodwinds equal to the cascades of the waterfall, strings who know what a summit view should sound like and a percussion battery capable of raising the ante of a thunderstorm to something like an earthquake. Happily all these effects were bound by feeling of symphonic intensity. Conducting from memory, Hauser made the ascent and descent seem dramatic rather than merely picturesque. An added bonus was the powerful St. Jean Baptiste organ.