This disc is part showcase, part demonstration of the Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana’s own links with Richard Strauss. Five bonus tracks include Strauss himself conducting four of his orchestral songs with the band in 1947 – in a concert that also, incidentally, featured the Bougeois gentilhomme Suite – preceded by the grandiloquent pre-concert speech given by Bernhard Paumgartner on the occasion. The songs, not previously released (as far as I’m aware), are fascinating, and the only available recording (again, as far as I’m aware) of the composer conducting his songs with a soprano. His tempi, perhaps surprisingly, are very much what we’d expect from performances today, while Annette Brun’s straightforward delivery matches Strauss’s own no-nonsense, but nonetheless affecting approach.

The late Duett-Concertino was also composed for the OSI, and premiered by them a year later. Here it receives a performance of the right urbane, easy-going mellowness, with Corrado Giuffredi mellifluous and Alberto Biano garrulous respectively. The beautiful brief Andante is particularly fine, even if the players can’t quite dispel the suspicion that the Rondo rambles a little.

The Bürger als Edelmann Suite, from three decades earlier, is arguably one of the key works – along with the associated Ariadne auf Naxos – to point towards Strauss’s late neo-classicism. It and the Duett-Concertino make an appealing coupling, as Paavo Järvi showed on his pairing of them with the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie on Pentatone. Poschner and his chamber forces offer plenty of fluid virtuosity here, too, with tempi feeling relaxed, even if they’re not actually slow (in contrast to the more pointed, sharp-focused approach from Järvi). There’s some beautifully sensitive playing in the two Lully-inspired numbers, plenty of humour throughout the ‘dinner’. Ultimately, though, both here and in the Duett-Concertino I think the OSI are pipped to the post in terms of warmth and wry wit by Kempe’s Staatskapelle Dresden, though this is a most enjoyable disc, which serves as an interesting complement to Järvi’s.

It’s nicely engineered, too, even if the recording level between the first and second work is different. CPO’s booklet essay is an interesting read, but it is hampered – as alas so often with this label – by poor, potentially misleading translation: ‘unpolitisch’ does not, for example, translate as ‘impolitic’.