Marc Albrecht understands the key to much of this music: play it fast. Strauss needs a sense of urgency, and in Don Juan that’s just what we get. This isn’t quite as dashing as Kempe’s reading, but it’s awfully close, meaning that it’s awfully good: passionate love music, eruptive climaxes, and a sensitive but not too sentimental conclusion. Just what the doctor ordered. Death and Transfiguration has many of the same qualities. It’s not quite as “transfigured” as Karajan could make it, but the moment of death, with its soft tam-tam strokes, is very well handled, and the climaxes leap from the speakers as they must.
Till Eulenspiegel doesn’t rise to the same standard, and here the issue may be the Strasbourg orchestra, which plays very well but hasn’t quite the security to make Strauss’ hellishly difficult rhythms lurch and leap as they should. This music is all about controlled chaos, and Albrecht seems to be too much about control and simply not chaotic enough in the loud outbursts. They sound stiff. The brief excerpt from Intermezzo makes a very appealing encore–it sounds like one of the slow, quiet bits of Death and Transfiguration. The sonics are very good in all formats–perhaps a touch lacking in depth, but at one with these direct and mostly refreshing performances.
