United Kingdom Bonis, Mozart, R. Strauss: Javier Perianes (piano), BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra / Anja Bihlmaier (conductor), City Halls, Glasgow, 24.4.2025. (SRT)
Mel Bonis – Trois femmes de légende
Mozart – Piano Concerto No.17
Richard Strauss – Elektra – symphonic suite (arr. Manfred Honeck and Tomáš Ille)
The treat in this concert was Richard Strauss’s Elektra Symphonic Suite. We are relatively used to hearing orchestral transcriptions of Wagner’s music dramas in the concert hall, but not so much those of Strauss. Why not, though? There is every bit as much excellent music there waiting to be heard in a new context and hearing it like this casts an illumination onto the opera’s soundworld that might get lost in the theatre amidst the staging and the voices.
Conductor Manfred Honeck certainly thinks so. He joined forces with Tomáš Ille to create the Elektra Suite in 2016, and it already has a healthy concert life, as well as a recording with Honeck’s Pittsburgh forces. Their transcription/arrangement/creation understands that Elektra is perhaps the most symphonic of Strauss’s operas and it plays to that by having two ‘subjects’ as its structural pivots, which are then developed quasi-symphonically as the piece’s 35-minute span unfolds. Its main driver is the opera’s narrative, and it proceeds roughly chronologically through the story. That has the effect that the orchestra’s opening cries of Agamemnon! are in the ‘wrong’ key, but that is so that they are in the right key for Elektra’s monologue, which begins the piece and spearheads the way through to the frenzied final dance, which is played pretty much as Strauss wrote it.
Does it work? You bet! It is tremendously exciting hearing under the bonnet of Strauss’s behemoth, and plenty of things jumped onto my ear that I had never noticed before in the actual opera. More importantly, conductor Anja Bihlmaier controlled the music’s slow burning fuse extremely impressively so that the sugar-rush highlights were building blocks of an overall structure rather than oversized granite outcrops.
Symphony orchestras only rarely get to play operatic music in this way and, as a rule, they love getting their teeth into it when they get the chance. So it proved for the musicians of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, who relished the chance to show they could play this score like the best of them. Those great orchestral tutti passages were sufficiently adrenaline-fuelled, but subtle moments carried just as much impact, such as the dark, shuddering strings for Chrysothemis’s fear, or the superbly rich low brass in Orestes’s music. Perhaps the recognition scene was the highlight, as the strings seemed to take on new heights of emotional investment, but the whole thing hung together remarkably impressively.
Almost anything would seem slight next to this pile-driver, but Mel Bonis’s Trois femmes de légende felt like almost embarrassingly thin gruel. There is a tenuous Strauss connection there in Bonis’s (very different) music for Salome, but the languid, orientalist textures and shimmering fin-de-siècle Impressionism couldn’t mask the feeling that there was not very much going on behind the façade, for all that it was delicately played.
Far more, of course, was going on in Mozart’s Piano Concerto No.17, and it was interesting to see how much of that in this performance was driven by the orchestra. It is relatively rare to hear a modern symphony orchestra playing Mozart concertos these days – and even rarer to hear them play his symphonies – but the gains were obvious here in lovely richness to the string tone, especially in the slow movement which carried rapt intensity you just don’t get with a period band. Pianist Javier Perianes turned around in his seat to watch the orchestra during the opening tutti, as though keen to immerse himself in the beauty of what was going on around him, and who could blame him when the result was so lovely?
Perianes matched the orchestra’s sound with a lovely lightness of touch on the keyboard, maintaining a conversational to-and-fro in the first movement despite a slight tendency to push ahead. His playing was shot through with gentle melancholy in the slow movement, with a delicate, seemingly moonlit cadenza. However, the sun came out joyously in the playful finale which swaggered and bustled while remaining mischievously light on its feet.
Available on BBC Sounds until 24th May 2025.
Simon Thompson