Richard Strauss was not always noted for his sound judgment but he got some things right: he revered Mozart. Last night’s Philharmonia concert showed that putting Mozart alongside Strauss is a good way of celebrating the 150th anniversary of Strauss’s birth. In Strauss’s orchestral tone poem Don Juan (only distantly related to Mozart’s Don Giovanni ), the Slovakian conductor Juraj Valcuha relished the lurching mood swings, busy, brash and boisterous one moment, tender the next, finally settling into post-coital calm.
Later Valcuha offered an orchestral suite from Strauss’s opera Der Rosenkavalier, a work in which the composer wished himself back into Mozart’s era. Many of the opera’s most beautiful moments were there but, caught in the bright lights of the orchestra platform, they felt thin.
Unusually, Valcuha gave us not just one suite from an opera, but two, with vocal soloists added for highlights from Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel. Taking the title roles, mezzo Kai Rüütel and soprano Olena Tokar, singing without scores, were well-matched. No substitute for the full opera, it was still enchanting.
Amid this heady late Romanticism, Mozart’s Ninth Piano Concerto, the so-called “Jeunehomme” (a misspelling of the name of the young woman who inspired the piece) was coolly refreshing. Although Valcuha went for full-bodied orchestral sound, he never threatened to overwhelm soloist Jonathan Biss. In the fast outer movements, Biss might have allowed himself a little more space but he shaped the lines with subtlety and rhythmic sense. By contrast, he conjured a mood of darkness for the slow movement, his fingers seeming to caress the music from the keys.
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