Turning music into ‘multi-media’ isn’t new, but it is taking on new life with the soaring popularity of DVD and home cinema. Whether the results are any more convincing is another matter. This new DVD, grafting Tobias Melle’s landscape and nature photography onto Strauss’s most programmatic symphony (once a damning dismissal!), certainly works better than most – for several reasons.

For one, the performance itself is highly enjoyable. Zinman may not scale the craggiest slopes of Karajan or Haitink’s airiest heights, but he conducts a dynamic, exciting reading, large-scale yet well gauged, never sacrificing structure or phrasing to bombast. His players respond with verve, and the recording, especially in surround sound, is equally atmospheric.

Adding pictures, though, raises a fundamental question – do they enhance music, or simply reduce it to an accompaniment? Almost always the latter, because rather than conveying images, music recreates them out of the listener’s own imagination and memory, tinged with emotional and other hues. Other visuals, however appropriate, will almost always clash with this personal response. Melle’s, though, interfere less than most; also an alpinist and an orchestral musician, he created them with the score in head and heart. And because they are stills, closely edited to the score with subtle dissolve techniques, the effect is more contemplative and less busy than video, more in harmony with the music.

However, another problem remains. It’s now generally accepted that the Alpine isn’t as purely pictorial as was once assumed, but has overtones of Nietzschean philosophy, linking it to Also Sprach Zarathustra. Does the photography obscure this, tethering it too firmly to literalism? For me it does; but it remains a undeniably enjoyable experience.