Davis brings the easy confidence and command of an instinctive Straussian to both works on the programme. It’s a canny coupling, too, in which the Intermezzo interludes serve to emphasise the domestic reality that lies behind the tongue-in-cheek self-mythologisation of Heldenleben. The pacing throughout is immaculate, climaxes are gauged with skill, and there’s a real sense of the orchestra giving of their best for both the conductor and this taxing repertoire. These are both live performances, and the audience’s appreciation – after the tone-poem especially – is also very apparent.

Highlights include loving accounts of both the wonderful ‘Träumerei am Kamin’ from Strauss’s ‘bourgeois comedy’ and the tender moments between Hero and Companion in Heldenleben. Davis is expert in the complex manoeuvres of the tone-poem’s central battle, and keeps the thread through the complex web of self-quotation of the ‘works of peace’, which culminates in an all too audible – and apt – sense of the hero’s exhaustion. Elsewhere there’s a hint of everything being perhaps a little too good-humoured, though, with the hero’s theme appearing to chug jovially along rather than pulse with the urgency of creative inspiration. But maybe that’s all part of the conductor’s plan to emphasise his domestic side, and it’s an approach further underlined by the well-played but rather equable Companion presented by concertmaster Dale Bartrop.

It’s a shame, though, that the engineers at Melbourne’s Hamer Hall present a swimmy acoustic that robs the playing of immediacy and bite, with the middle of the orchestra always sounding rather congested and the strings, in particular, coming across as overly smooth and muted. There are more immediate-sounding Heldenlebens out there (from Reiner and Karajan to, more recently, Thielemann and Nelsons, to name but a few), and the better-recorded Vienna and Berlin Philharmonics are ultimately more recommendable in the Intermezzo Interludes. But this doesn’t stop the disc serving as a valuable memento of the live performances and a record of a fine Straussian on masterly form.