Stenz gets the proportions exactly right. He plunges us into the delirium of the melancholy hero's addled brain with a clarity pointing forward to Schoenberg's First Chamber Symphony...Adventurous Alban Gerhardt is vivid as Quixote takes several tumbles...The peerless viola player Laurence Power is luxury casting as an equally human Sancho Panza. No stars needed to be drafted in for one of the best Till Eulenspiegels on disc...an irrepressible performance.

pictorial points are in general well made; the scenes are colourfully set; and both Gerhardt and Power are such fine, sensitive and expressive musicians that they encapsulate the varied moods of their protagonists poignantly and purposefully. Markus Stenz attacks Till Eulenspiegel with vigour

an excellent account of Don Quixote. The catalogue isn’t exactly short of fine recordings but this one competes with the best. Gerhardt and Power are marvellous principals but they manage to project their characters splendidly while giving us a sense also that they are primus inter pares, as Strauss intended.

the playing here is first-rate, and Alban Gerhardt and Lawrence Power are vivid soloists.

Gerhardt and Power convey the complex nature of the relationship between the two...Stenz's conducting is all about the cumulative impact of small gestures rather than grand statements. We're conscious throughout of the classical form at the work's heart, though Stenz is also marvellous when it comes to those astonishing moments when the Don's fantasies assume a transcendent reality greater than anything on earth. It's nigh-on perfect.

[Power and Gerhardt are] both magnificent, and neither distorts the work's shape with excessive ego displays. This is a sublime, idiomatically phrased performance, given by the very orchestra which premiered the work. So you’d expect something special. The moments of quiet rapture are divine...The high points are too numerous to list