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GREENSBORO - An act of galling braggadocio. A cheeky autobiography. A fairy tale. There are many ways to play - and listen to - Ein Heldenleben (A Hero's Life).

But as the closing piece at the 2008 Eastern Music Festival on Saturday, Richard Strauss' 1898 tone poem had the feel of a musical valedictory.

EMF Director Gerard Schwarz led an orchestra bulked up to more than a hundred players in a testosterone-fueled performance that, through most of its first 25 minutes, played up the work's youthful muscle.

But as the performance coasted into its more elegiac side, the playing evoked a stirring sense of noble purpose.

It reflected fondly on triumphs past - and the summer held many at EMF - yet exhorted musicians and listeners to rise to challenges to come.

It's impossible to come away from a performance of Heldenleben not feeling exhilaration. The sheer size of the orchestra and sound it produces in its bone-rattling "Battlefield" sequence ensure that.

But it's rare to encounter playing that balances the racket with the emotional resonance and poignancy that the musicians and Schwarz coaxed from the surrounding passages.

By coincidence, both the Greensboro and Winston-Salem symphonies will be performing Heldenleben in September. Their maestros have much to live up to.

Though still young, Strauss already had many orchestral poems behind him: Don Juan, Till Eulenspiegel, Also Sprach Zarathustra (with the "fanfare" theme heard in "2001"), Don Quixote. Tired of portraits from literature, he created a new work with himself as its "star" and his wife as his "co-star."

He wrote a colleague, possibly tongue-in-cheek, "I don't see why I shouldn't compose a symphony about myself. I find myself quite as interesting as Napoleon or Alexander."

He left his fingerprints all over it. In the section called "The Hero's Works of Peace," he wove quotes from more than a dozen of his works into his tapestry. Many could be heard Saturday in the clean, transparent playing.

There are many sectional solos - heroic ones for horns and, for woodwinds, the shrill carpings of the hero's back-biting adversaries.

No one got a more demanding role than the concertmaster, whose violin is the voice of the hero's "companion."

Jeffrey Multer heeded Strauss' detailed score instructions. Strauss described his wife as "very feminine, a little perverse, a little coquettish, at every minute different from how she had been the moment before."

All of that was reflected in Multer's mercurial playing. Tongue-tied responses in lower strings amusingly depicted the hero's bashful befuddlement.

Schwarz bore down on the "Battlefield" section with a thrilling, full-on assault. Dana Auditorium was almost too small for that much sound.

Heldenleben was a startling contrast to the program's first half, which consisted of Haydn's Cello Concerto in C and Mozart's Overture to Don Giovanni - written for orchestras a quarter to a fifth the size.

French cellist Xavier Phillips, a protege of Mstislav Rostropovitch, was the soloist in the Haydn, which dates from about 1765.

The piece, one of Haydn's relatively scarce concertos, showed him in his early mature period, moving from baroque to a more classical style. It's a sunny piece with a lovely adagio, where a graceful cello note holds over violins before taking up the melody.

Playing on a Matteo Gofriller cello that was already 50 years old when Haydn composed the piece, Phillips produced a warm, chocolatey tone and smoothly navigated the tricky passages in the instrument's upper registers.

In the Mozart overture, Schwarz drew a crisp, nimble performance that set its contrasting melodrama and frivolity in high relief.

Jim Shertzer is a freelance contributor.