My colleague Jed Distler has already praised this set to the skies in its previous budget-priced EMI incarnation (type Q704 in the search box for that review), and rightly so. This is simply the finest Strauss orchestral music collection ever assembled, the benchmark by which all others are still judged. Rudolf Kempe’s approach is light, swift, and most importantly, musical. He turns Strauss’ orchestral excesses into miracles of light and shade, elegantly phrased, tuneful, and colorful. There are no weak performances at all, including the concertante pieces, and if in the larger tone poems (Ein Heldenleben, for example) Kempe seems to underplay the more heavily scored episodes, this always serves to underline the music’s larger continuity and coherence. Most of the time, he’s simply exciting as hell, nowhere more so than in Don Juan and Till Eulenspiegel, and of course no other set includes such a large and comprehensive selection of lesser-known pieces. The playing of the Staatskapelle Dresden is beyond praise in terms of its understanding of the idiom, and EMI’s recordings, though a bit variable, were excellent for their day and still sound so now. A treasure. [12/1/2005]
