Strauss's Don Quixote and Tchaikovsky at Long Beach

Cécilia Tsan (cello), Music Director Eckart Preu, and the Long Beach Symphony acknowledge the heartfelt reception for their performance of Richard Strauss’s Don Quixote.

REVIEW

Long Beach Symphony, Terrace Theater, Beverly O'Neill Performing Arts Center, Long Beach

DAVID J BROWN

The first half of the January concert in the Long Beach Symphony’s 2025-2026 season was devoted to Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 35 (1878), played by the American violinist Tai Murray with the LBSO as ever under the baton of its Music Director Eckart Preu. As is well known, Tchaikovsky wrote it, on the rebound from his brief and disastrous marriage, while staying in Switzerland with his composition pupil, the violinist Iosif Kotek. Composition was rapid, and in close collaboration with Kotek, who was also probably his lover.

Tchaikovsky with Iosef Kotek (left).

The performance was sumptuously romantic from the outset, with exquisite intonation from Ms. Murray and the customary attentive skill with which Maestro Preu managed the orchestra’s interaction with her. However—and this could well reflect being seated unexpectedly in the remote regions of the Terrace Theater’s Loge rather as normally in the Orchestra seats—to these ears their expansive account of the long first movement to some degree lacked urgency and the emotional tension that’s surely behind the work’s genesis and is indeed never far beneath the surface of Tchaikovsky’s music, and thus making the movement seem more like a meditative rhapsody than a dynamically evolving structure.

Nonetheless the audience was on its collective feet and cheering even after that first movement, and following an inarguably inward and tender account of the Canzonetta, with some deliciously pointed woodwind contributions, Tchaikovsky’s attacca subito before the Finale fortunately neutered the impulse to any more inter-movement applause. This Finale certainly lived up to its initial Allegro vivacissimo marking, and Preu’s control through what seemed more extreme tempo contrasts than usual in this movement held it together securely.

Tai Murray speaking at the
 post-concer reception.

The rapturous reaction from the near-capacity audience was redoubled at the concerto’s whiplash conclusion, and Ms Murray rewarded them with, as encore, a poised and haunting performance of the Largo third movement from J. S. Bach’s Sonata No. 3 in C major, BWV 1005, for solo violin.

Near the end of his long life Richard Strauss (1864-1949) is said to have remarked "I may not be a first-rate composer, but I am a first-class second-rate composer." We cannot know how much genuine self-deprecation or irony there was in that statement, but if one at least amongst his orchestral works justifies him being elevated to the top level of the pantheon it is Don Quixote: Phantastische Variationen über ein Thema ritterlichen Charakters, Op. 34 (1897), with the clever double meaning buried within that subtitle.

Richard Strauss around the time of
Don Quixote's composition.

The work is indeed an extraordinarily virtuosic set of variations on a musical theme “of knightly character,” but equally “theme” in this context can be taken to mean the personality of its titular hero, with those “variations” being aspects of both his character and his actions. Strauss’s balancing of this double meaning, with genius-level musical craft bringing to life a profoundly human subject, is the central factor that elevates this seventh of Strauss's ten tone-poems to true greatness.

The 10 numbered and titled variations that form the main body of Don Quixote have two preceding sections, the first of them an extensive Introduction, so varied in mood, texture and dynamic that it could stand as a miniature symphonic poem all by itself. Not only does it adumbrate the very distinctive themes that represent the Don and his squire Sancho Panza— who are “officially” introduced in the second of those preceding sections by the solo cello and viola that represent them—but it also foreshadows the dramatic events that unfold in the variations themselves.

To include Don Quixote in an LBSO concert had been an ambition cherished alike by Maestro Preu, Principal Cello Cécilia Tsan, and President Kelly Ruggirello for several years but, caught first between the Scylla of Covid and then the Charybdis of budgetary restrictions, only in this season was it at last possible to mount the work, given Strauss’s very large orchestral specification. And it was clear from the outset—particularly as we were now reseated in our usual section close to the stage—that this was going to be an exceptional account of the piece.

Andrew Duckles and Eckart Preu.

In an illuminating pre-concert chat with Maestro Preu, LBSO Principal Viola Andrew Duckles (the evening’s Sancho Panza) opined that Don Quixote is really the first “concerto for orchestra,” given how Strauss exploits each instrument and tests every player to the utmost, and already in the Introduction alone Preu’s spacious and skillful direction, and the LBSO’s devoted following of him, demonstrated the truth of this in translucent detail, as individual players and sections, from solo flute down to the tubas (one tenor, one bass)—notably via an important thematic statement from the viola section alone—each had their moment in the spotlight.

And then, after this resplendent and tumultuous preparation, we met the Don himself in the person of Ms. Tsan, celebrating 25 years as the LBSO’s Principal Cello. In yet another demonstration of Strauss’s mastery, he carefully conceives the cello part as a “first amongst equals” rather than with concerto solo prominence, and Ms. Tsan’s assumption of the role was a consummate embodiment of this. Her opening solo certainly projected the bold challenge of the Don’s first appearance—where Strauss’s theme embraces imperiousness, grace, and underlying disturbance—but immediately there was the first of many generous collaborations with other players, this being the duet with solo violin (Concertmaster Roger Wilkie) that elaborates contrapuntally on the theme.

Sancho Panza first arrives (Maggiore in the score) in a huffing, rumbling duet between tenor tuba and bass clarinet (Arisa Makita and Michael Yoshimi respectively) but the viola soon takes center stage in the story’s second important characterization. Mr Duckles conveyed all of the part’s various confidences and hesitancies, cheerfulness and questionings—and in this opening relished another of Strauss’s “concerto for orchestra” inspirations, duetting with the piccolo (Diane Alancraig).

In brief comments before the start Maestro Preu confessed that his favorites amongst the 10 variations were #II, where Quixote mistakes a herd of sheep for an emperor’s army and engages them, and #VII, the “ride through the air.”

The former is probably the most extreme example of scoring innovation in the entire work, and the LBSO brass duly bleated pianissimo against witterings from multi-divided cellos ppp, and then along with all the winds fortissimo as they were attacked. Strauss’s sense of proportion in this work is unfailing, however. Each of these most virtuoso of the variations—in #VII grand brass cadences are borne aloft by swirling woodwind and strings and energetically cranked wind machine—lasts barely a minute. Nothing outstays its welcome.

Indeed, all the variations proceed one to the next without pause, so that any successful performance must neither minimize nor stumble over the many abrupt changes of instrumental texture, speed, dynamic, meter, and key, where Strauss’s musical narrative turns on a dime from humor to grandeur, from heroic tragedy to bucolic musing. Preu’s masterly handling of the score and the LBSO’s response managed to combine all the sudden vividness of contrast needed with overall conviction and coherence.

Cécilia Tsan at the post-concert reception.

Ms. Tsan carried the Finale, where Quixote at lasts returns to sanity, with playing of radiant tenderness than never threatened to slip into exaggeration or sentimentality, and Preu and the orchestra maintained their eloquent support.

The Finale’s moments of renewed agitation and, latterly, near-exact repetition of the orchestra’s first statements of the principal themes in the Introduction, show Strauss’s mastery in perfectly closing the work’s expressive circle, and the performers’ unerring nailing of these aspects as well as the rich eloquence that pervades the movement and the gentle quietude of its end set the seal on one of the finest accounts of this masterpiece that I have ever heard.

Two concerts remain in the LBSO’s 2025-2026 Classical season. On February 28 Pepe Romero returns to play Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez in a program that opens with Gabriela Lena Frank’s Elegia Andina for Orchestra and concludes with the first two of Handel’s Water Music suites. Then to close the season, on June 6 the orchestra musters even larger forces than the Strauss for Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, with Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik as the amuse-bouche. 

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Long Beach Symphony Orchestra, Terrace Theater, Beverly O'Neill Performing Arts Center, Long Beach, Saturday, January 31, 2026, 7.30 p.m.

Images: The performance: Todd Mason and David de Santiago; Tchaikovsky and Kotek: tchaikovsky-research.net; Richard Strauss: Wikimedia Commons.