The two performances on this often remarkable album were recorded almost three years apart, with Heldenleben taped live in Rome, during a series of concerts in January 2018, and its companion piece, the Burleske, made in the same venue, the Parco della Musica, under studio conditions in October last year. Antonio Pappano has only given us one Strauss album before, a vocal recital with Nina Stemme and the Royal Opera Orchestra (EMI, 6/07), so the new CD marks both his first foray into the composer’s orchestral works and his first Strauss disc with his Italian orchestra. Quite why he has taken so long remains something of a mystery. It has, however, been worth the wait.

His Heldenleben is one of the finest I’ve heard in some time, a beautifully controlled interpretation that is often quite extraordinarily moving. Given that we tend to think of Strauss’s self-referential tone poem primarily as thrilling or impressive, the emotional depth of Pappano’s performance is unusually striking. This is partly a matter of playing it relatively straight and adopting a more subtle approach to its multiple ironies than we commonly encounter, so that the tone of the grander sections suggests a lofty nobility rather than rhetorical bombast. It’s an approach, however, that also allows Pappano to locate the work’s emotional kernel not in the Hero’s conflicts with his Critics but in his relationship with his Companion. The love scene has a passionate, almost operatic intensity here: we’re very much reminded of Norman Del Mar’s comment that the passage cries out for the addition of voices. And the closing section, taken astonishingly slowly, is breathtaking and extraordinarily affecting in its sincerity.

This is not to say there isn’t drama elsewhere. The opening has terrific élan. Later on, Pappano generates tremendous excitement in the battle scene, though he carefully underscores the point that the passage represents the development section of the work’s symphonic argument, so that we’re aware of the music’s logic as well as its power. His Santa Cecilia Orchestra has become a force to be reckoned with under his directorship, and the playing throughout is wonderful in its focus and clarity. The recording is beautifully engineered, and only the vaguest hint of rustling as the trumpet fanfares intrude on the intimacy of the love scene reminds us that it was made live.

The Burleske, with Bertrand Chamayou the excellent soloist, is also special. Chamayou plays it with devil-may-care virtuosity and bags of charm, though he lets the mood turn bittersweet in the lyrical central section of the waltz that forms the second subject and assumes prominence in the coda. Pappano has great fun with the work’s roguish glances in the direction of Liszt, Mendelssohn and Brahms but also reminds us just how much it pre-empts the humour of Till Eulenspiegel, Feuersnot and Der Rosenkavalier. The orchestral playing has wonderful panache, and the recording is again crystal clear. It’s an excellent disc, highly recommended.