Pretre as a Strauss conductor is not an automatic association of ideas until one remembers that he made his Paris debut conducting the first performance there of Capriccio. He certainly has the feel of the music at the point of his baton, for the Philharmonia's playing of Zarathustra is alert to the many subtleties of detail which the admirably balanced recording allows us to hear and there is a clarity which one hesitates to ascribe to the conductor's nationality, for after all it is achieved by many non-French conductors. The tonal range of the recording is exemplified by the undistorted organ in the depths at the start of the work and by the high woodwind in those dazzling passages which anticipate the Bourgeois gentilhomme music. The organ is very well recorded—presumably mixed into the Walthamstow Town Hall acoustic from Central Hall, Westminster.
Zarathustra by itself is rather short shrift for a whole LP these days and Karajan's latest Berlin/DG recording offers Don Juan in addition. While Pretre often gives us a thrilling a quality of Straussian sound, though I think he takes the fugue too stodgily, the playing does not equal the Berliners in consistent sumptuousness. As a high-voltage interpretation Solti's is hard to beat—and his Decca recording includes both Don Juan and Till Eulenspiegel—but Pretre finds more poetry in this often misunderstood work (though not so much as Kempe did in his great 1973 Dresden HMV recording, alas not at the moment available). The Philharmonia strings as here recorded must yield place to Berlin and Chicago, though Christopher Warren-Green's solo playing is exemplary. I should add that on my review copy, the climax of the 'sunrise' opening distorts.'