Kirill Petrenko opens the new season at the Berlin Philharmonic with Richard Strauss’s self-portrait as a hero at odds with an uncomprehending world. But there’s romance, too, as the heroic template requires. “I find myself no less interesting than Napoleon,” the composer advised the French novelist and Nobel Prize–winner Romain Rolland. At 50 minutes, “A Hero’s Life” runs longer than any of the seven symphonic tone poems that preceded it. It’s technical demands are greater, too, and it’s peppered with quotations. Grandiose? Sure, but so thrilling! As an hors d’oeuvre, there’s Max Reger’s Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Mozart, op. 132, which overlays its source material with a rich post-Romantic impasto very much in the vein of the main course to follow. —Matthew Gurewitsch