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The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and their Chief Conductor Sir Andrew Davis continue their acclaimed survey of the orchestral music of Richard Strauss with two contrasting, characterful and ambitious works. An Alpine Symphony is a work of monumental proportions. Depicting the ascent of an Alpine mountainside, from scenes of pastoral beauty to an enormous storm, it calls for over 120 players and lasts over 50 minutes. It was famously the first-ever work to be pressed onto a compact disc, in a recording by Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic. A narrative of a very different kind is found in Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks, this time the misadventures of a German peasant: disrupting a market, chasing girls, mocking professors – and, ultimately, being hanged for his misdemeanours. This work finds the MSO’s musicians at their most virtuosic, with many of the players called on to depict the vivid characters we encounter in the story. The MSO’s Strauss series was launched in 2014 with a major European tour including the BBC Proms and Concertgebouw, and has so far included Four Last Songs with Erin Wall, Ein Heldenleben, Four Symphonic Interludes, Also Sprach Zarathustra and Don Juan. The recordings have won significant acclaim from the international press, with BBC Music Magazine describing Also Sprach as ‘a benchmark recording’.