I thought at first that we might have a winner here. The opening paragraph of the main work is beautifully caught, Strauss’s evocation of burgeoning light and life never more telling than in the hands of the Vienna Philharmonic. But with the arrival of the sun, things begin to go sadly awry. There are two main problems. First, the sound. Climaxes have presence but surely Philips were reproducing cymbal transients more gratefully a quarter-century ago. To my ears, anything over mezzo-forte sounds congested, and the effect is no more sympathetic than that achieved by the much-criticized DG sound engineers for Karajan in 1980. Compare and contrast Telarc’s warm, albeit recessed, soundstage for the Vienna Philharmonic under Previn. The second problem is Ozawa himself. Surely there should be some sort of emotional surge at “Sunrise”? It’s curiously passionless, and the following “Ascent” is downright odd, the melodic line distorted by snatched string accents. Shorn of appropriate rhetoric, Strauss’s material at times seems uncomfortably thin and the journey proceeds by a series of unmusical jerks.
It may be that Ozawa doesn’t want to pre-empt later, grander climaxes, but once there he confuses excitement with high decibel levels. The brass are encouraged to blare and, as the summit is reached, there is a desperate lack of anything approaching the ‘visionary’. In his booklet-notes, Michael Kennedy writes of the work’s “elemental power, a mystical and pantheistic response to nature” also to be found in Delius, Nielsen and Vaughan Williams. Sadly, these are qualities missed by the present performance. What remains is a mere “travelogue of 24 hours in the mountains” – minutely observed but lacking much in the way of insight or illumination.
Still, we have the makeweights, and if the two-minute Fanfare fur die Wiener Philharmoniker is of little interest, the Feierlicher Einzug der Ritter des Johanniter-Ordens (the “Solemn entry of the Knights of St John”) is worth hearing: a short, stately march for brass. That said, only the most ardent Straussian is likely to consider this disc worth its asking price. No, Kempe or Karajan are still the tour guides to go for. Anyone wanting the Vienna Philharmonic in digital sound should stick with Previn. He keeps a lighter hand on the tiller and there’s scarcely a blunt or unnatural phrase. Or so it seems after Ozawa’s effortful progress. Yet again, Philips have elected to record him in unsuitable repertoire: when will they give us some Messiaen or, better still, some Henze?'