Robin Ticciati, DSO Berlin & Louise Alder - Strauss - Gramophone

For his first Richard Strauss album, Robin Ticciati offers a welcome deviation from the standard. We’ve got two of the composer’s most popular early tone poems, admittedly, but as a coupling come the remarkable Brentano Lieder, composed for Elisabeth Schumann towards the end of the First World War but rarely presented as a complete set. It’s a Straussian showcase with a difference, then, and one as much for Ticciati and his Berlin orchestra as for soprano Louise Alder.

Ticciati’s Don Juan immediately sets the tone: lucid, patient, beautifully turned and with a protagonist characterised more by whispered refinements than testosterone-fuelled swagger. It’s not a performance to sweep you dramatically off your feet but the gentle seductions are beautifully layered and controlled (listen to the tranquillo section around 2'40", for example), and the textures, in Linn’s exemplary engineering, always transparent. The final bars, too, are wonderfully vivid.

The same virtues inform the supremely eloquent performance of Tod und Verklärung. The dying man’s torments have sounded more agitated elsewhere but his dreams are traced out in some lovely wind-playing. Ticciati is happy to build up to the big moments without rushing and frames the climaxes with a sure touch. The textures, once more, are outstandingly clear and well balanced.

The conductor’s care in that regard is especially welcome in the Brentano Lieder, where Alder’s light, silvery soprano is allowed to shine without ever sounding pushed and the details of Strauss’s orchestrations are lovingly conveyed. The soprano negotiates the songs’ tessitura, and in the case of ‘Amor’ its flickering coloratura too, with assurance. She brings a winning freshness to ‘Ich wollt ein Sträusslein binden’ and ‘Säusle, liebe Myrthe’, and is beautifully tender in ‘Als mir dein Lied erklang’.

The voice could arguably do with a bit more heft in the lower and middle range, and, for all Alder’s eloquence, the concluding ‘Lied der Frauen’ feels a size or two too big for her (Ricarda Merbeth, though a less beguiling singer, shows what a larger voice can do here). But it’s nevertheless a very fine performance and one that makes a handsome centrepiece for a fresh and invigorating album.