Anna Netrebko gets star billing here together with a front-cover photo of her walking along a snow-strewn path and swathed in a billowing red dress. But the main work is Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben. Netrebko sings the Four Last Songs, which, it must be admitted, is one of the prime reasons why music lovers will be drawn to this disc. She radiates a gorgeous tone, beautifully calibrated in mood and inflection, floating divinely in ‘Beim Schlafengehen’ and powerful in conveying the nub and the modulations of the poetic images throughout the cycle. The performance has the added asset of featuring the mellow timbres of the Berlin Staatskapelle, with Daniel Barenboim thoroughly at one in finding the music’s natural contours and the significant points of instrumental detail.

This performance was recorded at a concert in the Berlin Philharmonie last August, in which Barenboim also conducted Ein Heldenleben. You can actually hear him conducting right at the start of Ein Heldenleben when he emits some audible, effortful groans which resurface from time to time. But the effort is worth it: he directs a dramatic but reasoned interpretation, by no means grandstanding or overinflated but following the musical narrative with clear ideas about the states of mind that the score suggests and a coherent plan of how they fit together structurally. Whether in passages of affecting sensibility or those of more theatrical mien, the Staatskapelle, associated with Strauss ever since the composer himself conducted the orchestra in the early 20th century, play superbly.