This is an unusual program: a late work for unaccompanied flute by Ruth Schonthal, a Nocturne by the little-known Rudolf Tillmetz, and Don Quixote reduced from Strauss’s enormous orchestra to six players. What struck me on first listening was the intelligence with which Olmos Ensemble treats each piece. There is no sense here of the pieces being held at arm’s length as curiosities. 

Schonthal wrote her Theme and Variations in 2004, toward the end of her life. Mark Teplitsky is absolutely superb here. He masters the considerable technical demands and the work’s variety of moods with aplomb, allowing one to follow the larger course of the music without distraction. In his hand what might have sounded like a succession of finely differentiated miniatures instead seems to acquire an unstated internal narrative. A journey of some kind perhaps and, by the end, a form of resolution. That’s a considerable achievement for one player working with a single melody instrument. 

The other two works on the disc date from 1898, but the similarity ends there. Tillmetz was a pupil of Theobald Boehm who became principal flute of the Royal Bavarian Opera Orchestra while still in his teens. He wrote extensively for his instrument. This piece brings flute, horn, and piano together in what I suppose I must call salon music. I don’t mean that designation to be dismissive, however. Teplitsky, horn player Jeff Garza, and pianist Elizabeth Dorman are to be congratulated for demonstrating that the genre can possess more worth, and considerably less ephemerality, than is sometimes assumed. Tillmetz’s music is light in manner, yes, but it’s not disposable when played like this. 

Last comes Laszlo Varga’s 1997 arrangement of Don Quixote for clarinet, horn, violin, viola, cello, and piano. Varga, himself a distinguished cellist, preserves the cello’s Don and the viola’s Sancho while reimagining everything around them with great resourcefulness. I enjoyed it so much. Eric Gratz, Ilya Shterenberg, Garza, Colin Brookes, Julian Schwarz, and Dorman sound as familiar with Cervantes as they are with Strauss. Crucially, they understand that the score’s extravagant gestures arise from the novel’s characters and predicaments. Interestingly, I found that the reduction brought me closer to those characters and I found myself more thoroughly immersed in the burlesque than I usually am with the orchestral score. Varga does something more interesting than paring down Strauss’s original. His clever arrangement changes the listener’s distance from the action, and the Olmos players make that altered perspective wonderfully persuasive.