Strauss - Don Quixote
London Symphony Orchestra / Seiji Ozawa

The Guardian
Tim Ashley

'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,' Keats wrote - a dictum most of use, despite the greatness of its expression, would consider fatuous. Consciously or unconsciously, however, it seems to permeate the aesthetic of Seiji Ozawa, the Japanese conductor who frequently sacrifices the emotionally truth of music to a quest for the perfection of sonic beauty.

His performance of Strauss's Don Quixote with the London Symphony Orchestra is a case in point. What we hear is a miasma of sumptuous sound that overwhelms with its headiness. Ozawa dawdles pruriently over the immaculately sensual woodwind solos, the flaring brass and the lushness of the LOS strings. The playing is breathtaking, but the interpretation doesn't really get to the heart of the piece.

Strauss was, ultimately, less interested in beauty than psychology, and this is essentially a study in madness. Strauss' portrait of Cervantes's dotty hero depends for its effect on a weird double take. Don Quixote may be absurd, yet his cranky ideals have a moral worth and an emotional truth that far transcend the banal. Painstakingly depicted reality through which he moves. When the emphasis is placed on sonority, much of the work's ambivalence is consequently undermined.

Ozawa also gives the work the inauthentic double concerto treatment. Strauss employs solo cello and viola to characterise Quixote and Sancho Panza respectively, though he intended both lines to be played by the relevant orchestral section leaders. Ozawa uses no less than Mstislav Rostropovich and Yuri Bashmet, whose performances inject some much needed grit into the proceedings, and one's principal pleasure is derived from the interplay between the two.

Rostropovich is 'The Knight of the Doleful countenance' incarnate.  The shrieking glissando as he falls from his horse in this final battle is terrifying, while the shuddering tremor to which he dies is heart-rending. Bashmet is spectacular when he is depicting the squire's logorrhoea, playing elsewhere with a lyrical warmth that suggests his affectionate dependence on his master. When Rostropovich effectively had the podium to himself, Bashmet gazed at him with awestruck admiration, as well he might.

The tone-poem was preceded by Beethoven's Second Symphony, which was scrupulously played, though lacking at times in interpretative cohesion, and frequently replacing genuine elation with frantic excitement.