There seems to be a trend these days for creating new orchestra-only arrangements of music from Strauss’s operas. We’ve just had a new Elektra Suite from Manfred Honeck in Pittsburgh (Reference Recordings, 1/17), and now, up the interstate in Buffalo, JoAnn Falletta gives us a ‘Symphony-Suite’ based on Ariadne auf Naxos.

It has its virtues as a coupling for the Bourgeois gentilhomme Suite, and D Wilson Ochoa’s arrangement is eminently sensible and impressively sewn together. It offers 35 minutes of music from the 1916 score in the order in which it appears, interpolating the Interlude from 1912 to break up ‘Es gibt ein Reich’ and the glorious final duet.

One shouldn’t be a purist about these sorts of arrangements: ever the pragmatist, Strauss set a precedent with the suites he cobbled together himself or sanctioned from his other operas. But Ariadne without words (and what words they are!) sounds thin and unrewarding indeed: the vocal lines get weedily sung out by a series of polite instruments, while the final duet, though it achieves a rousing final climax, footles along prettily but entirely inconsequentially in the absence of an Ariadne and Bacchus – it seems apt that the track-listing gives us Hofmannsthal’s poetic ‘Gibt es kein Hinüber?’ also in painfully prosaic translation as ‘Where is the passage?’

Matters aren’t helped by dull recorded sound and playing that is clean and efficient but hardly inspiring, all of which means that the Bourgeois gentilhomme Suite is hardly competitive in a packed catalogue either. The Ariadne Suite is an interesting experiment and a useful arrangement, no doubt, for orchestras unwilling or unable to stage the opera itself. On disc, though, we don’t really need to make such compromises.