Well, it's really a choice. If you are attempting to capture the entire tonal range of a high contrast scene, you have three choices. Take with a single exposure, exposing just enough to protect important highlights, and post-process the rest of the scene to recover the shadows and bring the middle value tones up a bit. The results can and often do require quite a bit of work on the midtones and shadows to bring detail and contrast, increase color saturation, and the big one - noise reduction.This must be applied locally to the areas that need it - not the entire image. Reasonably strong post processing would be required, along with shooting raw.

Second alternative is to take mutiple exposures, and either use an HDR program to merge the individual pictures, or do it manually in Photoshop or something similar. or use luminosity masking. You can shoot either jpeg or raw, but you might still get smoother tone and color transitions and have more adjustment latitude if you shoot raw.

Or you can skip the shot altogether and move on to an easier photo op.