It’s unusual to find Johann Strauss II and his rather different namesake, Richard Strauss, in one programme but there’s no reason why not. I don’t subscribe to the fashionable view that every concert has to be thematic.
Moreover, the former Strauss’s Die Fledermaus music is such a thing of exuberant joy that its overture makes an exhilarating concert opener. Manfred Honek, the Philharmonia’s new Principal Conductor Designate – with second violins to his right – balanced it well with dramatic dynamics, eloquent transitional passages and lots of Viennese colour, including splendid accelerandi and bravura piccolo playing.
A fifty per cent reduction in forces and the arrival of traditional timps with their lovely rattly hard-stick sound led to the meat in the sandwich: Emanuel Ax playing Mozart’s Piano Concerto no 25 K503. In the first movement Ax, always unshowy, gave us a pleasing sense of the notes arching from the piano in a continuum. The Andante came with plaintive delicacy from the piano, responsive string work and some delightful horn playing and the final Allegretto was played at an intelligently restrained tempo. It was touching to see him gently joining in the final chords after his part had ended – as if this venerable pro, who doesn’t do histrionics and has nothing to prove, simply wants to be involved to the very last bar.
For his encore Ax played Schubert’s Standchen in D minor, intriguingly arranged for solo piano by Franz Liszt with an echo across right and left hands. Pretty and elegant, it was a fitting choice after the Mozart. Then came a comedic moment when Ax almost dragged leader Zsolt-Tihamer Visontay off stage with him as a way of extricating himself from the tumultuous applause. Smiles all round.
After the interval Big Forces arrived for Richard Strauss’s Elektra Suite: harp, nine double basses, six horns, two timpanists and the like. Strauss’s opera dates from 1906-8 and this suite, arranged by Manfred Honek and Tomas Ille in 2014 is effectively a “new” tone poem. It comes with trademark Strauss extravagant orchestration and plenty of large scale drama – both narratively and musically. Most of the opera plot is there – a family story of revenge and murder for which we get passages of exquisite lyricism and others of visceral brass and percussion as the story unfolds. Honek ensured that we noticed, and were moved by, the beautiful string octet section as Elektra in the opera cries: “Oh, let me see your eyes. And the tambourine roll as she lies lying was quite something. This was an affecting, palpably authentic account partly because here we had Honeck making his mark on the Philharmonia and conducting his own work.
An enjoyable concert then whose disparate programming was rather refreshing. One small housekeeping point: It is traditional for the piano to be ceremonially centre staged and the seating rearranged before a piano concerto. Why? It would make far more sense to position the piano from the beginning of the concert, play the opener around it and remove it at the interval, as happens at Cadogan Hall. On this occasion there was a full, tiresome ten-minute hiatus, only a few minutes after the concert had begun. It’s a modus operandi which begins to feel unnecessarily clumsy.
