Though Strauss has never featured prominently in Daniel Barenboim’s conducting career, either in the concert hall or opera house, he has recorded Ein Heldenleben before, in the early 1990s for Erato, to launch a series devoted to Strauss’s symphonic poems with the Chicago Symphony. Returning to it now with the Berlin Staatskapelle, which Strauss himself conducted at the turn of the 20th century, his performance revels in the colours that this fabulous orchestra draws from the score. Taken from a charity concert at the Berlin Philharmonie in aid of the reconstruction of the Staatsoper, Barenboim’s account doesn’t swagger as much as some, favouring Wagnerian weightiness instead. It’s the orchestral playing – the solo horn and violin especially – that’s the real treat in the Four Last Songs, too; still, the selling point of the disc is that it’s Anna Netrebko’s first foray into singing German on disc. Her performance sometimes seems rather effortful, as if struggling to get the scale of these orchestral songs just right, but the sound is consistently gorgeous, if not especially moving.
