Authoritative from the first bar’s fleshy bass, Antonio Pappano’s bel canto approach to Strauss’s mock-epic hero cultivates beauty of sound even in usually bombastically noisy stretches such as the central battle. There is gravitas in the breadth of this performance, yet it also has operatic exuberance in spades.

His Santa Cecilia Orchestra has become a force to be reckoned with under his directorship, and the playing throughout is wonderful in its focus and clarity.

The composer-hero emerges as unusually grounded (though crucially never earth-bound) from the very first phrases of this loveable, refreshingly unbombastic Heldenleben, thanks to Pappano’s spacious tempi and the broad, generous sweep of the Santa Cecilia strings; there’s a thrilling edge to the brass in the battle-scene, and leader Roberto Gonzales-Monjas is ideally capricious and beguiling in his depiction of Strauss’s wife Pauline. And Chamayou’s deft, exuberant pianism in the early Burleske is a joy.

Pappano revels in the spiteful woodwind chattering of the Hero’s Adversaries (critics), the mostly flattering rapture of his Companion (Strauss’s wife, Pauline, here brilliantly characterised by the solo violinist, Roberto González-Monjas) and the bravado of the battle scene. In the Burleske Chamayou makes light of the difficulties its dedicatee, the pianist Hans von Bülow, declined to play.