There is no shortage of good recordings of Also sprach Zarathustra a work that needs CD to do its orchestration full justice. Karajan's Berlin performance for DG is so magnificently played and is such a comprehensive interpretation that it still leads the field and is coupled, as in this new Tennstedt/LPO recording, with Don Juan. The same coupling, with the addition of two songs with orchestra, is favoured by Jarvi on Chandos; his is an excellent interpretation, but the recording has less presence than some of the others in his fine Strauss series.
Tennstedt, with his acute sensitivity to nuance presents a Zarathustra that will rank high in any future assessment of the best recorded interpretations of the piece. The recording has an extremely wide dynamic range, and Tennstedt's famed ability to achieve a real pianissimo means that the opening of the ''science fugue''—''Von der Wissenschaft''—on the low strings is practically inaudible unless one turns up the volume-control very high—and then beware when the next fortissimo arrives! The London Philharmonic plays magnificently for him—a 'super-orchestra' already. The shimmer of the strings in alt and their swirling eddies before the start of the ''Tanzlied'' are real virtuoso playing, with the woodwind equally scintillating. The violin solo in this episode is just a little straitlaced. At the midnight-bell section, the effect is of being tossed on the ocean in a storm as the whole texture heaves and buckles.
But, with all the excitement engendered by the orchestral playing, I could not escape the impression at the end of the performance that it all added up to an expose of the work's most inspired bits of scoring rather than, as in Karajan's case, a continuously evolving interpretation of the piece as a whole.
The Don Juan has too many unauthorized ritardandos and the tempo fluctuations verge on the mannered. Again, this is an episodic interpretation rather than one which sees the piece as a whole. Yet there is no gainsaying the beauty of the playing in the love scene. On the whole, though, the ardour is not as incandescent as in the comparisons selected above, nor as in some other performances.'