Decca are celebrating Solti’s 50 years of loyal service with a number of releases including this glitzily-packaged offering of Strauss favourites. Sadly the sound as such is not top-drawer: the maestro’s preference for live recording makes for predictable problems in a difficult venue. That said, the music-making is never less than robust, belying fashionable assumptions that the conductor has mellowed as he approaches his eighty-fifth birthday. The wit and verve of his latter-day Mozart is recalled in a spirited, if not always ideally refined, account of Till. This is a piece well suited to Solti’s eruptive, attacking style and one in which his grip has scarcely relaxed since his much-acclaimed Chicago version of two decades ago. There is some wonderful playing from clarinet and horn and rather more subtlety of feeling (and of microphone placement) than in Also sprach Zarathustra. Its opening sunrise, though less grandiose than Karajan’s, sounds well enough, but during the following segment, “Von den Hinterweltlern”, the ear quickly registers too much steel in the string tone. Any performance of Also sprach stands or falls not by its famous opening (in Strauss as in Nietzsche, a mere introduction) but by these long-limned string phrases, finessed by Karajan into something more touching and sincere than the programme perhaps demands. With Solti at the helm, “Das Tanzlied” again glares too harshly to convey much in the way of affection. While there are bursts of the old energy, the interpretation does not quite hang together, and, given the conductor’s profound familiarity with Salome, her “Dance of the Seven Veils” makes a surprisingly stiff-limbed and inelegant encore.
The booklet states that these performances were edited together from live concerts and it may be that Decca’s production team have been rather too determined to remove the evidence: hence the shallow perspective and the tendency to zero in on instrumental detail. Whether or not you feel compelled to join the jubilee, you might consider investing in Solti’s more consistent Chicago performances of the tone-poems, now on Double Decca. Impecunious buyers should also note that Karajan’s single mid-price analogue disc (1/96) includes all three pieces plus a substantial extra work in Don Juan.'