Autobiographical in content, Richard Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben is one of a series of tone-poems, including Also sprach Zarathustra (Naxos 8.571215), in which he explored the utmost limits of extra-musical content in this form. The hero passes through love and adversity, confrontation, triumph in battle and fulfilment in a single, powerfully descriptive symphonic span. Gerard Schwarz’s Ein Heldenleben has been acclaimed as “exciting and inspired” (Gramophone). The opera Capriccio is a romantic struggle to choose between words and music which opens with a gloriously bitter-sweet string sextet.