Christian Thielemann has already recorded Strauss’s Alpensinfonie twice – with the Vienna Philharmonic, once on CD (DG, 6/01) and once on DVD (Opus Arte, 9/12), from Salzburg – but the performance captured here, given as part of Dresden’s Strauss celebrations last year with the orchestra that premiered the piece, offers something special.

The camera direction reveals the conductor as cool and calm in his podium manner until the moving ‘Sunset’, played with impassioned warmth, and the rest of the performance seems to trace a seamless line towards those final pages, with Thielemann avoiding all temptations to bombast or excess en route. That’s not to say that the passages of excitement or exhilaration are given short shrift: the arrival at the summit is properly heady and breathtaking, the storm is awe-inspiring, as are the screw-turning build-ups preceding it, while the orchestra offers glittering virtuosity when required elsewhere.

It’s a performance, however, that underlines primarily the work’s philosophical underpinnings and its symphonic logic; others might offer more thrills (and spills), but few offer such coherence. Thielemann’s own Salzburg DVD might just surpass it, by offering that extra excitement as well, but that doesn’t have quite such an appealing coupling.

If the ‘Last Songs’ on the cover might seem like a misprint, it reflects the fact that the Famous Four are here joined by the very last song, ‘Malven’ (1948), in a delicate and sensitive orchestration by Wolfgang Rihm. Some might object to the usual arrangement being upset – ‘Malven’ is inserted between ‘Frühling’ and ‘September’ – but it makes a touching addition to a set whose order and make-up were never entirely fixed.

At flowing tempi, Anja Harteros offers wonderful performances, and the voice – perhaps initially a little wirier of tone than in her earlier Four Last Songs with this orchestra under Fabio Luisi (Sony, 4/08) – is still beguilingly soft-grained; but the performances are distinguished primarily by the singer’s sheer musicality, the phrasing and the intelligent use of the words. The final phrases of ‘September’ and ‘Im Abendrot’, in particular, are exquisite.

Rihm’s own Ernster Gesang provides a suitably sincere and autumnal opening to what was clearly an outstanding concert.