As I noted in my recent Collection on Strauss’s Don Quixote (7/21), one of the main decisions to be made when recording this work is whether to employ orchestral soloists or sprinkle a little stardust over the solo role(s). Usually that applies only to the solo cello, but here Harmonia Mundi has brought in not just Jean-Guihen Queyras but also star viola player Tabea Zimmermann to this new recording from François-Xavier Roth and the Gürzenich-Orchester Köln – the orchestra that premiered the work.

The last recording to opt for similar double star-casting, incidentally, also hailed from Cologne, with Alban Gerhardt and Lawrence Power as Don Quixote and his squire, under Markus Stenz. Certainly there’s a lot of wonderful playing to enjoy from both of the soloists on the new recording, with Queyras eloquent and more sweet-toned than Gerhardt, and Zimmermann bringing wonderful warmth to the viola part. Perhaps inevitably, Harmonia Mundi’s engineers decide to put them both in the spotlight, which makes for some unnatural balance – at Queyras’s first entrance, for example, he’s almost as loud as the fff chords that bring the introduction to a close.

Learn to live with that – and the slightly recessed horns – and there’s a lot to like in this fine account. Roth favours airier textures than Stenz and keeps things lucid and flowing (a feature of his earlier SWR Classic recording, too) while bringing plenty of incisiveness, humour and imagination to Strauss’s wonderful score. He avoids indulgence, and Queyras admirably resists milking his solo passages; Quixote’s death, though relatively swift, is beautifully done, although I’d ideally like a bit more weight and grandeur as he hobbles home after his defeat.

The superb account of Till Eulenspiegel that follows, though, is more fully satisfying. Here Roth lets his orchestra off the leash thrillingly, and they respond with brilliant virtuosity and playing of vivid character and razor-sharp focus. Roth, too, feels freer, relishing all the score’s humour and negotiating the shifts in tempo and mood with the lightest of touches. With an eloquent account of the early cello Romanze completing the programme, this adds up to a solidly recommendable album.