Although this concert will have been programmed well before Manfred Honeck was appointed the Philharmonia’s Chief Conductor Designate, it still felt like a statement of intent. The three works were a vitrine for different facets of his skill set. The overture was about interpretation, the concerto showcased collaboration, the second-half blockbuster celebrated ambition. Through it all, the orchestra played for its new maestro with a zest and radiance that recalled its glory days – a good omen for times to come.
Johann Strauss II may have been the Waltz King but only the bravest of souls would dare take the floor to Honeck’s stop-go thrill ride. But the operetta Die Fledermaus was not made for the dance floor so anything goes provided it’s musically valid. Just as well, because Honeck’s tempi were so supple and elastic, riven with ritardandi and tenuti, that the only polkas were those danced by the nimble arms of the string players. It was a pleasure as guilty as a Viennese Sachertorte.
For nourishment of greater substance, Honeck teamed up with Emanuel Ax in Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 25 in C major, K503. The venerable 77-year-old played as though joined at the hip to his Austrian podium partner, the latter a mere stripling at 68, in a ravishing display of youthful artistry that belied their combined ages. Ax imbued the first movement cadenza with epic assertiveness, then rendered the Andante, one of Mozart’s most elaborate slow movements, with sinewy convolutions that bespoke the composer’s absolute mastery and maturity when he wrote it, aged 30. As an encore, Ax played Franz Liszt’s transcription of Schubert’s Standchen with spellbinding shades of grace and beauty, especially when articulating Liszt’s interior echoes of the melody.
Such delicacy seldom appeared elsewhere in the programme and certainly not in the transcription (by Honeck and Tomáš Ille) of music from Richard Strauss’ Elektra. This 35-minute distillation of about one third of the full score felt less blood-soaked and more symphonic than the opera we experience in the opera house, and that was almost certainly the adaptors’ intention. If anything, it might stand as a companion work to, say, Also sprach Zarathustra in both form and atmosphere.
Admirers of the opera as written will have been reassured that this Elektra Suite began, as it should, with the stark brass utterance of “Agamemnon!” that opens the opera. They will then have relished every twist and turn of Strauss’ majestic orchestration for a massive phalanx of the Philharmonia’s finest. As section after section related the gruesome Greek tale, whether spotlit or highlighted against other instruments, the suite became something of a ‘Grown-Up’s Guide to the Orchestra’. On the down side, the orchestrators were at such pains to keep the spikiness in proportion that they seemed to cherry-pick all Elektra’s romantic moments, such as they are, to the extent that they accentuated unexpected affinities with Strauss and von Hofmannstahl’s follow-up collaboration... a very different cut of meat called Der Rosenkavalier.
