The opening tutti of the 17-year-old Richard Strauss’s Violin Concerto has a Schumann-like ring to it, especially as played by the Wiener Symphoniker under the enthusiastic baton of Petr Popelka. The finger-twisting solo part is full of multiple-stops and yet at around 8'00" into the first movement the mood assumes a brand of simplicity that is quite disarming. The profile of the second movement’s central Lento ma non troppo is uncannily like the central ‘Improvisation’ of the Violin Sonata of five years later, a generally superior work (that Jascha Heifetz played repeatedly even in the face of anti-Strauss opposition after the war). Renaud Capuçon does well by both pieces but with the incomparable Heifetz performances of the Sonata committed to memory, this early masterpiece remains ‘his’ work, though Capuçon’s playing is enjoyable on its own terms. The Concerto, however, has no such classic advocate, and Capuçon’s purity of tone and, in the finale, unaffected brilliance make a strong impression.

This enjoyable résumé of Strauss’s violin music is missing just two potential charmers: the song ‘Morgen’ (‘Tomorrow’) for voice, violin, and piano and ‘An einsamer Quelle’ (‘Beside the Spring’) as arranged (and recorded) by Heifetz. What we do have is the brief Daphne-Etude on a theme from the opera, and the Brahmsian Piano Quartet in C minor, composed when Strauss was just 20 years old (the excellent pianist here is Guillaume Bellom), the Andante third movement an approximate precursor of ‘Morgen’.

The remainder of the album (the majority of it, in fact) is made up of top-ranking Strauss. The dreamily escapist string sextet that opens the wartime opera Capriccio – among Strauss’s most beautiful pages – is given a memorable reading by a group of players that includes, alongside Capuçon, Christoph Koncz and Gérard Caussé as well as Veronika, Clemens and Julia Hagen. A recently discovered string septet arrangement of Strauss’s attempt to express in musical terms the devastation caused by the Second World War, his Metamorphosen, takes us closer to the work’s tragic core than the version for 23 solo strings that we know and love so well, certainly when performed as sensitively as it is here.

And finally, after Metamorphosen’s sombre memorial, a celebration of life as written in 1898, Ein Heldenlebden, where Capuçon plays the Hero’s (spirited) companion with the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester under the late Seiji Ozawa, a performance that delivers an especially warm reading of the work’s closing pages, ‘The Hero’s Retreat from the World and Fulfilment’. I can’t say that the rest quite matches up to the numerous great Heldenlebens on disc already available on disc (Fritz Reiner on RCA, for example); Ozawa’s opening is a bit soggy but it’s in general well played and cleanly recorded. Something of a curate’s egg, then, with high points that are well worth hearing.