The second volume of Roth’s survey offers two of Strauss’s finest tone-poems and one relative failure. Macbeth was the first major work which Strauss regarded primarily as a tone-poem, even if it doesn’t carry the memorability of its successors. Roth holds the loosely structured piece together remarkably well; the SWR SO, playing with conviction, create considerable tension through repetitive material and, in the gentle closing section, convey something of a sense of tragedy.

Till Eulenspiegel was written three years later and I have rarely heard it played better. The spontaneous richness of the descriptive sequences is like a witty kaleidoscope and the result is an undoubted masterpiece. The opening is immediately seductive, with strings and woodwind catching the ear engagingly, and the introduction on the horn of Till himself is played with a perky spontaneity. Among his various pranks, his meeting with the scholarly professors is a highlight, as are the dramatic brass sonorites pronouncing Till’s sentence of hanging. Yet Roth also catches the humour of the rogue’s final forced departure to the next world, cocking his snook as he goes.

Don Quixote is far more complex. Again the music is rich in invention and at times spectacularly scored. Don Quixote is sensitively and movingly portrayed by Frank-Michael Guthmann’s solo cello. His squire, Sancho Panza, is captured equally effectively by Johannes Lüthy’s viola. There is much characteristically fine lyrical writing, which the SWR strings and woodwind obviously relish with sumptuous ardour, and the elegiac close to the Don’s imaginary adventures is certainly moving.

Roth directs all three performances with flair and understanding. They are superbly detailed and realistically recorded.