I’ve always found Richard Strauss’s character a real mystery: a smug, rather banal bourgeois with a narcissistic streak, he wrote sublime music which itself often teeters on the edge of banality. I enjoyed this Heldenleben but, at 47 minutes, the hero, while not exactly an arthritic Colonel Blimp, isn’t a young buck full of rising sap, either. This is surprising, considering Yannick Nézet-Séguin is one of the most athletic conductors around today.

The opening lacks the self-confident swagger that Beecham brought to it for EMI (at the age of 80). In the second movement, the “battle” rages effectively enough, although I can never escape the feeling that Mahler depicts his critics far more bitingly in the Rondo burlesque of his Ninth Symphony. Strauss’s wife Pauline, a granite-jawed termagant in real life, comes across relatively sympathetically in the extended (and ravishingly played) violin solo of the third movement. The ending, depicting the hero’s retrospective contemplation, is simply too slow, although the Rotterdam Philharmonic’s horns are glorious. The orchestra, which plays well throughout, also sounds very distant and was recorded at a curiously low level. I’d prefer any of Karajan’s readings, or Fritz Reiner’s legendary RCA one.

The...