Palm Beach Symphony scales the heights with “Alpine Symphony”
Wed Jan 14, 2026 at 10:40 am
Gerard Schwarz led the Palm Beach Symphony in Richard Strauss’s Alpine Symphony Tuesday night in West Palm Beach.
The 50-plus-minute work requires a huge ensemble that includes eight horns, two tubas, an organ, a wind machine and a supersized oboe called a heckelphone. And like Saint-Saëns’ grandiose Organ Symphony, it’s sometimes dismissed as pompous over-orchestrated kitsch (“not an achievement that will add luster to the composer’s reputation,” sniffed the New York Times after a 1916 performance.)
But the piece brims with stirring passages that would appeal to anyone who loves Strauss’s music, and the Palm Beach Symphony gave a vivid, thrilling performance Tuesday night at the Kravis Center in West Palm Beach.
The stage was packed with musicians from end to end, from huge string sections to a corps of percussionists and brass players. Conductor Gerard Schwarz managed the large forces with skill, drawing out the power of the brass brigade without letting it dominate the rest of the orchestra.
It’s usually bad news when a projection screen appears over an orchestra, since most of us already spend enough time in front of screens. But in this case, the screen was used only to helpfully identify which of the work’s 22 sections (Sunrise, At the Summit etc.) was being played.