Jeffrey Tate is up against some formidable memories in tackling Strauss's Le bourgeois gentilhomme suite. Can he possibly match Beecham's suave elegance and the composer's insouciance? The answer is no, because he is neither of those musicians, nor of their period. But he brings his own sterling qualities to the delightful score, principally a musical truth that is wholly refreshing and also his remarkable capacity, so evident in his Mozart recordings, for stripping away the accretions of time and letting us hear the music as if it were restored to its pristine condition. He is aided here by some of the ECO's wittiest and most supple playing, notably the violin and cello solos of Jose-Luis Garcia and Olga Hegedus respectively, plus the virtuoso playing of the important piano part by Clifford Benson. The trumpet in the Fencing-Master, too, shines as brightly as the sun glinting from a rapier. EMI's recording highlights all these features without spotlighting them, so that one can savour the enormous skill of Strauss's scoring in all its facets.
Tate's percipience as an interpreter serves him even better in the performance of Metamorphosen, Strauss's sombre and moving elegy for the destruction of German culture and buildings during the defeat of the Nazi regime in 1945. This is, after all, a chamber work—a 'poem for 23 solo strings'—and although Karajan (DG) got Strauss's grudging approval for the use of twice that number, he alters the character of the music by doing so, however wonderfully he performs it (and he does). Tate lets us hear the miraculous interweaving of the parts, the shiftings of tone-colour amid the ever-changing texture of the music. His tempos are good, too, with a rhythmic awareness that forestalls any danger of an impression of fatty tissue. Instead, we hear the fibres of the score, strong and binding. I was sorry to see that the otherwise admirable sleeve-note propounds that (I had hoped) discredited notion that Strauss had a ''lull'' between 1918 and 1942. Some lull is all I can say!'