It is good to have this collection of Strauss's music for brass transferred to CD. The sound is clear throughout and not too oppressively intense and the playing is of a high standard. The quality of the music is variable. Strauss evidently didn't put his heart into his parade marches as Elgar did into Pomp and Circumstance, but the original version of the Vienna Festmusik is an ear-opener and belongs among the best pieces of Strauss's last period. However, the disc is worth having for two other pieces, the superb Wagnerian Feierlicher Einzug of 1909 and the Fanfare zur Eroffnung der Musikwoche der Stadt Wien of 1924, to give it its full title, a strange, nostalgic piece which Robert Matthew Walker rightly calls ''curiously moving''. Incidentally, he errs in saying that Strauss's son and daughter-in-law had ''several children''. They had two sons.'