United Kingdom R. Strauss II, Mozart, R. Strauss: Emanuel Ax (piano) / Philharmonia Orchestra, Manfred Honeck (conductor). Royal Festival Hall, London. 12.11.2026. (AV-E)
R. Strauss II – Overture, Die Fledermaus
Mozart – Piano Concerto No.25, K.503
R. Strauss – Elektra Suite (arr. Honeck & Ille)
Johann Strauss II’s Die Fledermaus Overture opened the evening, Manfred Honeck drawing out the music’s heady mix of elegance and élan. The waltz melodies were shaped with a graded grace, while crisp accents and teasing rhythmic twists gave it a capricious, champagne-cork-popping character and sawing, springy swagger. The Philharmonia Orchestra played with exuberance and assurance: svelte strings, winsome winds, brazen brass and perforating percussion.
Emanuel Ax’s assured account of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No.25 in C major, K.503, was a performance of poetic poise and crystalline clarity. The playing had a pure, direct simplicity, allowing the music to speak for itself, with every phrase naturally nurtured and angelically articulated. In the opening Allegro maestoso, the imposing orchestral introduction established the movement’s breadth before Ax entered with a clarity that never obscured its grandeur. The pellucid piano tone remained clearly audible against the full weight of the orchestra, even in the tuttis, without Ax ever needing to force the sound. The supple strings provided a finely controlled foundation, while the woodwind were incisively integrated into the orchestral texture. The exchanges between soloist and orchestra were congenially conversational, each answering the other with a naturalness that reflected Ax and Honeck’s radar-radiant rapport.
The timpani made a particularly striking impression, their hard-stick strokes crisp and emphatic, giving the orchestral tuttis a firm rhythmic edge.
The Andante revealed the quiet eloquence of Ax’s limpid, liquid playing. The piano’s long-breathed cantabile phrases unfolded with unaffected tenderness, while Ax watched the woodwind players attentively, listening and responding to the subtle inflections of their individual voices. Their delicate exchanges lent the movement an exquisite exhalation.
In the Allegretto, Ax gave the recurring rondo theme an irrepressible lightness, its quicksilver turns and ornamental flourishes dispatched with effortless fluency. Honeck kept the dialogue between soloist and orchestra sparklingly buoyant, the exchanges alive with wit and rhythmic élan, before the concerto swept to an exhilarating close. Ax’s effortless ease bespoke a consummate command of the sinuous score.
For an encore, Ax offered Liszt’s arrangement of Schubert’s ‘Ständchen’ from the Schwanengesang song-cycle (D.957), its moonlit melody unfurling and undulating in emerald evanescences of sapphire sounds, with a tender translucent limestone lyricism, reverentially received by the adulatory audience.
‘The colour of blood’ was how one critic described the score of Richard Strauss’s 1909 opera Elektra, which tonight was distilled from 100 minutes to 33 in an orchestral suite-cum-symphonic poem by Austrian conductor Manfred Honeck and his long-time collaborator Tomáš Ille.
Honeck explained on BBC Radio 3 why he wanted to bring the suite into the concert hall: ‘I played myself the Elektra, several times in the Vienna State Opera, for example, under the baton of Lorin Maazel and Claudio Abbado, and I must say I loved it. It’s like a movie, a musical movie, I would say, and I wanted this piece also to be played in the concert house; that’s the reason why I did it. It did not exist yet, this symphonic poem, this version by Richard Strauss. For my opinion it’s such great music I don’t want to miss this in the concert hall. It would have been no sense to do another Rosenkavalier Suite, because it already exists, but for an Elektra, the most, in my opinion, orchestral opera, I was actually astonished why it’s not existing, the symphonic poem.’
Indeed, the Elektra Suite sounded like a movie soundtrack — and I mean this as a compliment, not a criticism — often reminding me of Bernard Herrmann’s film score for Hitchcock’s Psycho.
The symphonic suite made a curious miscalculation right from the start. Honeck’s own notes draw attention to the opening’s two statements of Agamemnon’s motif, echoing the opera’s opening gesture. Yet in this performance the repeated proclamation sounded laboured and ponderous, weakening rather than reinforcing its dramatic impact. It simply did not work. The Philharmonia’s brass gave the proclamations tremendous authority, with a thrilling bite to the attack and a splendidly burnished tone; the fault lay not in the playing, but in the effect of the repetition.
The recurring motifs give the Elektra Suite a degree of thematic coherence, but they do not make its episodes flow naturally into one another. The episodes follow one another in a succession of sharply demarcated blocks, sounding segmented, almost like a cut-and-paste construction, rather than flowing organically from one to the next. After the opening statements of Agamemnon’s theme, the music moves through Elektra’s lament and revenge music to Chrysothemis’s lyrical episode and Elektra’s triumphant dance. Yet these sections too often just sound placed side by side. The cut from Clytemnestra’s nightmare-haunted encounter with Elektra to the queen’s jubilant response to the false news of Orest’s death is one glaring example; the sudden insertion of the colourful interlude accompanying Clytemnestra’s retinue similarly interrupts the dark, brooding music heralding Orest’s arrival. More fundamentally, the rearrangement places Clytemnestra’s murder before the recognition scene, so that the jubilant horns and timpani announcing Orest arrive after the event they should help to prepare. The return of Agamemnon’s theme at the end gives the suite a cyclical frame, but cannot compensate for the abrupt joins and dislocated dramatic sequence within it.
The recurring motifs cannot cloak the episodic segmentation of the Elektra Suite. The rearrangement of the opera’s chronology further unsettles the dramatic progression, disrupting the essential forward momentum Strauss sustains across the original score. By comparison, Artur Rodziński’s Der Rosenkavalier Suite and Erich Leinsdorf’s Die Frau ohne Schatten Suite are more persuasive adaptations, their episodes unfolding with greater continuity and far less abruptness.
Honeck brought a brooding intensity to Elektra’s lonely lament, allowing the strings to sustain its grief-laden phrases while the woodwind coloured the music with plaintive inflections. The king-revenge and father-love motifs were sharply differentiated, their contrasting violence and tenderness clearly brought out by the orchestra. Chrysothemis’s yearning music was beautifully shaped, the strings and woodwind bringing warmth and delicacy before the dance-like writing gathered exuberant momentum. Its attacca transition into Elektra’s triumphant dance was one of the suite’s few entirely natural joins, the music seeming to grow out of what preceded it. That sense of continuity, however, was short-lived. The abrupt cut from Clytemnestra’s nightmare-haunted encounter with her daughter, with its dissonant unease and snarling brass, to the queen’s jubilant reaction to the false news of Orest’s death was particularly jarring. The menace had scarcely taken hold before the music veered elsewhere; the dramatic tension was simply abandoned.
The same cut-and-pasted transitions dogged Orest’s appearance. The dark, brooding writing in the lower strings and bassoons began to establish an atmosphere of mystery, only to be interrupted by the sudden eruption of the colourful interlude accompanying Clytemnestra’s retinue. The Philharmonia relished its orchestral bravura, but the insertion broke the thread just as Orest’s presence was beginning to exert its pull. More damagingly, the suite places Clytemnestra’s murder before the recognition between Orest and Elektra, reversing the opera’s dramatic order. The jubilant horn and timpani of the recognition scene therefore came after the murder, deprived of their proper dramatic function. The orchestra played the scene with tremendous fervour, capturing Elektra’s joy in a great surge of sound, but the rearrangement had already undermined the moment’s dramatic weight. Aegisth’s murder brought yet another abrupt change of scene. Again and again, the music seemed poised to gather force, only to be cut short. The recurring motifs provided thematic links but could not restore the dramatic continuity the rearrangement had fractured.
The symphonic suite’s tragic conclusion was delivered by three hard, ferocious percussion blows. The decapitating sensation was exhilaratingly annihilating: the aghast audience was momentarily marooned and stunned before erupting in ecstatic applause.
Thankfully, the Philharmonia Orchestra has just announced the appointment of the consummate and commanding Manfred Honeck as its next Principal Conductor, beginning in September 2028.
I listened back to the Elektra Suite on BBC Radio 3’s ‘In Concert’ rebroadcast, and the sound quality was absolutely appalling. The dynamic range was severely diminished, the climaxes smudged and the orchestral detail lost. Strauss’s scintillating score was reduced to mushy muzak, its violent and visceral impact incinerated. At 320 kbps, the broadcast sound was very heavily compressed compared with a CD or high-resolution sound. The broadcast’s constricted sound was a negation of the music itself, an act of sonic vandalism. Strauss would have ‘done his nut’, as they say.
Alexander Verney-Elliott