These performances add to the impressive array of repertoire combined with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s mix of versatility and excellence manifest in the ABC Classics releases reviewed here in August. Those had various different conductors but here the orchestra’s chief is in charge for one of the composers he knows best, Richard Strauss.

The centrepiece is a beautifully modulated, sensitively and sensuously soaring interpretation of the Four Last Songs by Erin Wall. Here, too, Davis reveals his understanding of the Straussian orchestral fabric with a judiciously balanced spectrum of timbres, the horn solo in ‘September’, for example, or the violin in ‘Beim Schlafengehen’ finding their natural place within the orchestral perspective. On either side of the Four Last Songs, Davis conducts Don Juan and Also sprach Zarathustra. The Don Juan lifts off with terrific confidence and swagger but Davis also has full measure of the music’s narrative pulse as the symphonic poem proceeds, with all the passion, poignancy and dramatic peaks drawn together in a seamlessly conceived performance. Acoustical breadth and warmth in the Hamer Hall is a notable asset at the start of Also sprach Zarathustra, where the grandeur of Strauss’s opening gesture is given ample space to assert itself. Thereafter, the quality that again comes through in this performance is its fine blend of subtlety, strength and spontaneity.