The lyric gift that makes Strauss’s operatic writing so memorable still bathes these lesser-known works in a Romantic glow, whether impassioned (the early Violin Sonata), celebratory (Taillefer, the choral ballad on the battle of Hastings) or elegiac (the monumental and haunting Deutsche Motette). Four instrumental arrangements from the operas themselves round out a stimulating companion to the 150th celebrations of the composer’s birth.
