It is difficult to think of a performing musician who divides critical opinion more completely than Christian Thielemann. There may have been extra-musical reasons for this, but in an era when few conductors feel compelled to focus on German Romantic repertoire and even fewer come up the old way via the opera houses of central Europe, his career profile, repertoire choices and interpretative manner continue to mark him out as a beast apart. This eagerly awaited Heldenleben will do little to alter perceptions. Admirers will relish its extraordinary command of detail and sonority; detractors may condemn its distension of favourite episodes as so much self-indulgent drooling. In fact Thielemann in 2002 takes only six minutes longer over the piece than did Willem Mengelberg in 1928. There may be a certain hollowness at its heart, but it would be unwise to attribute this to the music-making alone.

Thielemann says he trusts the Vienna Philharmonic to produce idiomatic Strauss without heavy-handed interventions from the rostrum. In truth he has original ideas about almost every phrase in what is a surprisingly soft-grained, even introspective ‘stop-go’ interpretation. For all the galumphing grandeur, you never sense that this hero’s life is being viewed from Olympian heights – compare and contrast Herbert von Karajan, whose celebrated LP version of 1959 is very nearly as slow overall. What Thielemann lacks is his one-time mentor’s fabled control of line. In the opening paragraph, the usual sense of gathering momentum is dissipated by subjective nuancing, ear-tweaking certainly, only not to all tastes. Excessively becalmed or not, the love music is gloriously done, with Rainer Honeck’s violin delineating a sympathetic portrait of Strauss’s wife, Pauline. Subsequently, his micro-managed battle won, the hero returns with a series of massive rhetorical hiatuses you’ll either love or loathe (try sampling the concluding portion of track 5). And yet the reading’s generally reflective temper is confirmed in the exquisite, almost chamber-like treatment of the later stages. That brief final apotheosis often feels tacked-on (as indeed it was by the composer). Not so here.

The Die Frau pot-pourri, placed first on the CD, is generally relaxed in feeling despite a clangorous final climax that feels unnecessarily Ivesian. Even Thielemann pronounces himself not entirely convinced by this ‘symphonic fantasy’, querying as have many commentators, the omission of the orchestral interludes from Act 2 of the opera. As throughout, the sound is spectacular rather than wholly natural. With trumpets and timps inclined to obtrude garishly and separated violin desks exhibiting some improbable tartness above the stave, the soundstage lacks a solid centre. The verdict must be ‘fascinating but flawed’, although anyone who enjoyed the same team’s remarkable Alpine Symphony (DG, 6/01) will find plenty to admire, and true believers will not hesitate.