As I have said before, it sometimes seems to me lately that every conductor and orchestra on the globe is busily engaged in recording Strauss tone-poems. I'm glad to think there is a market for all this multiplication, as presumably there must be. Barenboim's partnership with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra was launched with a resplendent Ein Heldenleben (8/91). He now follows it with Don Quixote, a more difficult work to bring off satisfactorily.
Well, this is certainly a virtuoso orchestra performing a virtuoso score and for the first ten minutes or so I feared it was to be no more than that. Where were the poetry and warmth which make Previn and the Vienna Philharmonic's recent Telarc/Conifer recording so appealing? They appeared during the playing of John Sharp, the orchestra's principal cellist, in Var. 3 (though I have to say that passionately as Barenboim conducts the climax of this episode, only Karajan on his EMI recording gets it absolutely and heart-stoppingly right—3/89, not currently available). And they were there again in Var. 5, as the night wind blows across the Spanish plain while Quixote keeps vigil over his armour, and in the lovely woodwind chords at the end of Var. 8, the prayer of thanksgiving offered by Quixote and Sancho Panza after their escape from drowning.
Like Previn's, Barenboim's soloists are orchestral principals, as Strauss originally intended. They are a little too closely recorded by the Erato engineers and the sound generally seems to my ears to be rather clinical. Perhaps that, rather than any deficiency in Barenboim's interpretation, is why I could not feel as involved in a work I adore as I do while listening to Previn's recording of it. The disc also includes yet another Don Juan, notable for a fine oboe solo and for the conductor's daringly long pause before the coda.'