Strauss: Don Quixote – Darlington

Every conductor who takes up Don Quixote must first answer a question that has nothing to do with tempo or balance: does he believe the old knight is a fool, or a saint? Strauss himself seems to have hedged on the matter, since the score simultaneously mocks its hero with braying winds and defends him with some of the most tender string writing in the composer’s output. Jonathan Darlington, on the evidence of this new account from Duisburg, comes down gently on the side of pathos, and the rendition is the more touching for it.

Darlington has spent years cultivating this orchestra, and it shows. The Duisburgers play with a burnished, slightly veiled string tone that suits Strauss’s autumnal harmonic language. This is, after all, a work written by a man not yet forty but already looking backward, already elegiac about chivalry, idealism, windmills mistaken for giants. The famous “wind machine” variation, the sheep, is handled with wit rather than cartoonish exaggeration. Nothing here is played for cheap laughs. That restraint tells you something about how seriously director and orchestra take the piece.

Friedemann Pardall is a persuasive Quixote. His tone is grainy rather than glamorous, and that suits a character who is meant to be threadbare, a little absurd, entirely sincere. The great variation depicting the knight’s night vigil, with its hushed tremolos and halting cello line, is beautifully sustained. Pardall resists the temptation to sentimentalize, letting the music’s own harmonic stasis do the emotional work. Mathias Feger’s Sancho Panza is equally well drawn. His viola has an earthy, burred quality that Strauss surely intended, since Sancho is meant to sound of the earth, practical, unglamorous, occasionally exasperated with his master’s flights of fancy.

Here is where I part company slightly with expectation. Listeners raised on the old Rostropovich–Karajan account (Olympia MKM238, still worth hearing despite dim, boxy 1975 sound) will find the two soloists here recessed, folded into the orchestral texture rather than thrust forward like concerto principals. I don’t think this is a flaw. Strauss did not write a cello concerto with orchestral trimmings. He wrote a symphonic poem in which the solo instruments are characters within an ensemble, not stars above it. Raphael Wallfisch’s version with Neeme Järvi and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra takes a comparably integrated approach, and Darlington’s balance sits closer to that tradition than to Karajan’s opulent, spotlit Berlin manner.

The playing throughout has an unforced naturalness: string portamento used sparingly but tellingly, brass that snarls without turning coarse, a genuine sense of narrative sweep across the ten variations. Darlington paces the introduction patiently, lets the “Knight of the Doleful Countenance” theme emerge from murk rather than announcing itself. The final variation, Quixote’s death, that long descending cello line dissolving into silence, is quietly devastating. I found myself moved in a way I hadn’t anticipated from a version I’d approached with only modest expectations.

And yet. Practicalities intrude, as they always do with this repertoire. Don Quixote runs under forty minutes, and Strauss’s other tone poems — Till Eulenspiegel, Also sprach Zarathustra, the underrated Macbeth, the sprawling domestic comedy of the Sinfonia Domestica — cry out as natural companions. Järvi’s Chandos survey offers exactly this kind of generous coupling across two well-filled discs, in sonics every bit as vivid as this new Acousence release, arguably more so. A single-work release at full price is a hard sell in 2024, whatever its musical virtues. Buyers should look for this at reduced cost, where the calculation changes considerably.

Musically, though, this is a Don Quixote of real character: unglamorous in the best sense, humane rather than heroic, an interpretation that trusts Cervantes’s melancholy as much as his comedy. Darlington and his orchestra deserve to be heard. Just don’t expect your wallet to escape entirely unscathed.