Someone at Philips had an inspiration in inviting Riccardo Muti to conduct Aus Italien with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. This was the orchestra which gave one of the earliest performances of this work, conducted by the composer, just over 100 years ago—''the most intelligent, most terrific and most lively orchestra I know'', he wrote home. He would surely have said the same, and more, today.
I cherish Clemens Krauss's old Decca LP of this work (nla), and Jarvi's recent Chandos recording with the SNO is excellent. But the Italian Muti is an ideal interpreter of this early, not fully mature but still delightful and sundrenched 'symphonic fantasy'. And with orchestral playing of the utmost refinement, full of warmth and colour, the score positively shimmers and gleams with the iridescence of the young composer's mastery. Strauss in 1889 was annoyed, justifiably, by a description of this work as ''a musical Baedeker of Southern Italy''—he had to put up with the same sort of remark 25 years later about the Alpine Symphony—and pointed out that his impressions of his holiday in Italy were, in Beethoven's phrase, ''more feeling than painting''.
Muti conveys the feeling and the painting in a performance of really exceptional beauty, with the Neapolitan frolic (which caused the work to be hissed at its first performance!) an exhilarating cheerful finale. The performance of Don Juan, the first indisputable masterpiece among the tone-poems, is also very beautifully played and recorded, but because of excessively languorous tempos is nowhere near as exciting as Reiner's unbeatable RCA performance of 1961 (nla), nor as magisterial as Klemperer's EMI recording of the same year, recently reissued on CD. The oboe solo in the love episode almost comes to a halt, it is so slow. One of the most masterly features of Don Juan is its taut structure, whereby the several episodes are welded into a swift-moving whole. Under Muti it sprawls all over the place.
The Berlin orchestral performance is beyond praise (try from 12'20'' onwards for a sample of the admirable blend of strings and brass that Muti obtains) and the recording is warm and detailed. But whereas the Don Juan would come low on my shopping-list, an Aus Italien like this is unlikely to happen very often. You have only to play the opening to know that this is music-making of a very high order. Why don't we hear this work more often in the concert-hall?'