This compilation cradles the enchanting Sextet from Capriccio between the first and second Waltz Sequences from Der Rosenkavalier, prefacing both with the Burleske, Strauss’s nearly aborted piano concerto. Here is music running through 55 years of the composer’s life, all of it of an unforced warmth and vitality, making an early estimate of his idiom (‘a naive disposition to greet the obvious as if it were a discovery’ – Edward Sackville-West) more irrelevant than uncharitable.

Strauss may have set little store by his Burleske, composed when he was 21, but this scintillating jeu d’esprit is as witty as it is dashing, mischievously recalling the most epic of all piano concertos (Brahms’s Second) before sprinting off at yet another tangent. Eugen d’Albert gave the first performance after Hans von Bülow had considered it unplayable, but even his playing can hardly have brimmed over with greater zest than Jean-Yves Thibaudet’s; he is every inch the boulevardier enjoying a night out in Vienna.

Then there is Rosenkavalier, audaciously evoking the charm and decadence of 18th-century Vienna with a dance form of 100 years later. The Sextet from Capriccio, on the other hand, is music of infinite grace and refinement, and Blomstedt and the Gewandhaus remind you throughout of that ‘forgiving affection for human beings which has always been the mainspring of Strauss’s music’ (ES-W again).

-- Bryce Morrison, Gramophone [12/2005]