Strauss’s ‘unfailing mastery’, Franz Welser-Möst tells us in a booklet essay, ‘quite often leaves me speechless and with a wide grin on my face – not in laughter but in admiration for his many perfect touches of musical colouring and punctuation’. And indeed, much of that sense of wonder communicates itself in this album of tone poems for the Cleveland Orchestra’s own label, recorded live over multiple concerts last autumn.

Macbeth gets arguably its finest outing on disc here. Written before Don Juan but premiered after it, it pares Shakespeare down to a sequence of colloquies between the Thane and his wife and essentially forms Strauss’s first psychodrama. Its detractors have deemed it over-reliant on Liszt and Tchaikovsky as models but Welser-Möst reminds us just how much it actually anticipates Elektra, not only in the dark, blood-and-steel quality of the orchestration but also in its unwavering depiction of emotional extremes. As in Strauss’s own 1936 broadcast performance (Music and Arts, 7/00), speeds are at times close to breakneck, while tensions are screwed up to the sticking point and unflinchingly held there, often to terrifying effect. The playing is fantastically detailed, thrilling in its accuracy and drive, while the recording itself, wonderfully engineered, is just glorious. You emerge from it all feeling faintly shell-shocked: it’s a superb vindication of an undervalued work.

The same energy characterises much of Welser-Möst’s Don Juan, which gets off to a tremendous start with the opening cluster of themes flung out with terrific exuberance and restless panache. The first of the work’s major love scenes is very erotic, though the second, with its unforgettable oboe solo, may strike some as fractionally too cool: the playing is exquisite, almost aristocratic in its poise, but you miss the sensual languor that some interpreters – Fritz Reiner (RCA, 10/61), for instance – bring to the music here. Once the work gathers pace again with the famous horn calls, however, the momentum, excitement and brilliance are maintained until satiety and death consume everything at the close.

Welser-Möst’s Till Eulenspiegel, meanwhile, is a model of transparency, its restraint and elegance throwing its wit into sharp relief. This is not to say that there’s a lack of pathos or, where necessary, power: the Cleveland brass and percussion sound awesome when we reach Till’s execution, while his clarinet squeals of protest are at once funny and desperately sad. But Welser-Möst’s lightness of touch, combined with the refinement of the playing, allows us to hear the work as a scherzo as well as a rondo, and the dividends are enormous: Till is endearing as well as impudent; the music smiles, laughs and occasionally sobs; and the humour never turns caustic as it can all too easily do. It’s another outstanding performance. You could argue that the programme is rather short at 46 minutes but the playing is exceptionally fine, and Macbeth and Till are essential listening.