Alpine Symphony: Melbourne Symphony Orchestra scales heights

Beginning with an idyllic serenade and ending with an epic evocation of conquering a mountain, a new series erupts

Sir Andrew Davis returns to captain the MSO for this year’s Masters Series

Bounding energetically back onto to the podium after the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s summer hibernation, chief conductor Sir Andrew Davis opened this year’s Master Series with a technically audacious and stylistically eclectic program that built steadily in emotional intensity.

Beginning with the benign nocturnal murmurings of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s idyllic Serenade to Music (in choral arrangement), tension rose markedly as Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto flitted between exuberance, yearning, agitation and refinement. Scaling past those late Romantic heights, Richard Strauss’s sprawling tone poem, An Alpine Symphony, provided an epic evocation of human encounters with nature’s majesty and power: a revelatory sensory assault for Strauss’s imagined alpine explorers and the listener.

It is 53 years since the MSO last presented the Vaughan Williams: a setting of the scene in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice in which starlit lovers contemplate universal harmony — in love, music and the night sky.

Davis proved a sympathetic revivalist. After the radiant opening solo — rendered with luminous delicacy by concertmaster, Dale Barltrop — Davis drew forth soft, diaphanous textures with ease, sweeping dappled orchestral lines into nebulous bundles and eliciting clipped diction from an earnest MSO Chorus.

Refined and upright, Taiwanese-Australian violinist Ray Chen delivered a confident, generally elegant account of the Tchaikovsky Concerto; demonstrating superb left-hand precision and drawing a very light, sunny tone from his 1715 Stradivarius.

First movement running passages were fluent, cadenza harmonics pristine and upper register ascents meticulous. Persistent efforts to bolster volume and intensity introduced unattractive bowing noise: the quest for weightiness producing grinding, while glitzy final flourishes shattered phrases. Sensitive dynamic control, silky legato and gentler vibrato in reflective passages better revealed Chen’s musical potential.

Eclipsing all before it, the Strauss rose with organic fury under Davis’s baton, Night’s opening rumblings kept as jittery, primordial whispers and so heightening the triumphant burst of Sunrise. The 22 movements trace the journey of an alpine ascent and descent, with dramatic changes of scenery and climate along the way, various perils for the expedition team, and the humility-inducing grandeur of the view from the summit.

Alert to each imagery shift and adroitly balancing the vast orchestral forces before him, Davis kept intensity bubbling away, even as textures shifted unpredictably from massed splendour to simple sonorities.

With tension sustained, episodes burst to the surface with vivid spontaneity. Searing strings and a sea of woodwinds smoothly passed thematic materials and maintained individual voicing in layered dialogues, while tumultuous brass and percussion entries conveyed panoramic spectacle and tempest with unrelenting clarity.

Most impressive, was the nine-member horn section, under guest principal Timothy Jones.

An Alpine Symphony. Melbourne Symphony Orchestra & MSO Chorus. Hamer Hall, Melbourne, March 10.