Karajan’s last knight of the woeful countenance has had his artifical fangs removed, courtesy of DG’s Original-Image-Bit-Processing: with strings both solo and collective freed up a little, there’s less raging against the dying of the light, more humanity, though this Don Quixote does now strike me as a stiffer-jointed gentleman than the one that luridly strode forth in 1987. For the Berlin Philharmonic strings, the refurbishment means reduced bite in the introduction, heightened natural sheen in the F sharp major vision, which now coasts opulently along at a faster speed than on Karajan’s 1975 EMI version (more self-consciously beautiful in a recording that always makes the performance feel more spacious). In terms of Meneses’s contribution, a more realistic perspective takes away some of the lustre and highlights a fatal lack of young-at-heart chivalry – unlike Rostropovich, Karajan’s previous protagonist, this hero is always happier nursing his wounds than facing a challenge – but quietly reinforces the never over-sentimental, and hence unbearably moving, delivery of the death-bed oration. The aristocratic reserve is, of course, appropriate in the cellist’s case; but there’s no other dimension to the contributions of violinist Leon Spierer and viola-player Wolfram Christ’s absurdly slimline Sancho, and many of the woodwind solos – even when freshly revealed in the remastering – lack individuality.
If, in Don Quixote, the newly defined bass lines sometimes sound over-emphatic, they only reinforce the clarity and definition of Karajan’s brilliant Till. The care for articulation here is never arthritic, the sound more natural in the first place, the dazzling high-noon and its thunderous aftermath achieving an impact way beyond strip-cartoon story-telling: decidedly late Karajan Gold to set alongside the Emperor Waltz and the last Bruckner recordings.
An opera orchestra in Strauss’s most vivid opera for orchestra is an interesting idea, but no sure guarantee of success: the Metropolitan Opera players might, after all, be even less happy to take individual centre stage than their symphony hall counterparts. That proves, happily, not to be the case with Levine’s team of the last 20 years – not least because the cellist (very unusually indeed on disc, less so in concert) hails from the orchestra, and enjoys real chamber-musical dialogues with his colleagues. Try the beginning of Var. 3, where Jerry Grossman and violinist Raymond Gwienek suavely complement each other and viola-player Michael Ouzounian fluidly dovetails Sancho’s rejoinders so that he can boisterously assert himself by degrees; we’re reminded, too, that the bass clarinet and tenor tuba, both outstanding here, are equal partners in the squire’s characterization (full marks, too, later on, to the surprisingly winsome oboe duo playing the wenches mistaken for Dulcinea and company). Left alone, Grossman intelligently questions and probes every phrase in the vigil scene, though until a superb dying fall he’s a touch too sentimental in the Epilogue (listen to Meneses for pure legato nobility) and hardly the knight in shining armour when Quixote shows true valour, in which aspect those larger-than-life aristocrats Rostropovich and Schiff (Philips, 7/91 – nla) are untouchable.
Nor does the interpretation as a whole quite flow; with Kempe, one’s admiration is buoyantly drawn to the purely musical values of the piece, while Levine breaks up the narrative to draw our attention to graphic detail (though it’s not exactly his fault that a high-pitched wind machine of the dentist’s drill variety, setting the teeth on edge, makes the efforts of the airborne orchestra in Var. 7 pass for nought). The strings, it’s true, articulate every vocal gesture – especially Quixote’s wrath – with an accuracy and a vividness unequalled by any rival version, and Levine’s control over the mad strands of introduction and homecoming is so assured that I wanted to like the overall result more.
Perhaps the accumulation of earthy emphases is in the end self-defeating, never quite letting the music take wing: a problem more obviously exposed in Levine’s Tod und Verklarung, where the dying man is strapped, body and soul, to his sick-bed (again, the profile and clarity of the lower lines are quite phenomenal on their own terms). Levine does find a long-limbed grace in the afterlife – a true test of the conductor’s, rather than the composer’s, transfiguring power – though I’d have liked a little more sustained force from the brass, the one rather reticent component of the orchestra, in the last magnesium flare: nothing approaching the climactic waves of sound Previn conjures from the Vienna Philharmonic. The sound, as you might expect from a DG team working in the Manhattan Center – is rich, close and, like the performances, a little intimidating. '