Coming hard on the heels of Gustavo Dudamel’s first CD release with his own Los Angeles Philharmonic (5/13), this Strauss extravaganza ups the ante. It may or may not amount to a job application for the post Sir Simon Rattle will eventually vacate but it is being promoted as carrying forward the Berlin Strauss tradition of Herbert von Karajan. Not a good idea that. While Dudamel is a conductor of enormous promise, the long, deep, firmly supported breath of tone on which Karajan built his interpretative style finds little echo in this full-throated music-making.

Which is not to say that Dudamel doesn’t know his Strauss. He has long directed Also sprach Zarathustra from memory and turns in a performance which might not hang together with absolute inevitability but still feels deeply considered. The Introduction is deliberately underplayed so as not to over-balance the rest, the following segment expressively over-egged where intended to satirise religiosity. Tempi can be spacious in the other pieces too, only there I was less convinced. Though by no means slack, Till Eulenspiegel is not characterised with particular insight. And Don Juan is heavy and thick-textured, as if Dudamel had never heard the likes of Rudolf Kempe (EMI, 10/73^R). This is a score which needs to sound more like young man’s music.

You may have problems with the recorded sound too. Live recording often necessitates a closer, shallower sound than studio sessions. Could it be that this rather opaque sonority is what Dudamel actually likes? Karajan’s analogue Zarathustra of 1973 is a much easier listen, its low-rumbling, tummy-wobbling sunrise enhanced by a more resonant acoustic.

DG’s silver-disc reissue of these same works under Karajan finds room for Salome’s ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’ and comes with astronomical artwork indebted to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. That movie was made long before Dudamel was born, yet the three typically engaging action shots of the young conductor, counterintuitively tucked away inside the new booklet, come splattered with meteorite and asteroid debris. The main note, printed in pale brown on a dark brown background, is scarcely designed to be read. Is the target audience pre-teen and/or deemed likelier to download? The cover art combines images of deep space with more cosmic dandruff. Time to move on…