Philharmonia/Honeck/Ax review – principal conductor designate gives a scorching taste of things to come

Royal Festival Hall, LondonWith this programme of Strauss (Johann II and Richard) and Mozart – and Emanuel Ax the deft and lucid soloist – Manfred Honeck, who joins as principal conductor in 2028, gave an exciting statement of intent

‘I am a man of tradition,” Manfred Honeck, the Philharmonia’s new principal conductor designate, declared earlier this week in rehearsals. But for the 68-year-old Austrian, who in 2028 becomes only the seventh principal conductor in the ensemble’s 81-year history, it’s tradition as defined by Mahler: “Not the worship of the ashes but the preservation of fire.” It was a fire in full blaze by the end of last night’s concert – a scorching taste of things to come.

Even if you couldn’t see Honeck smiling at his musicians, or them smiling back, you could hear it in a Fledermaus Overture that could barely keep the mischievous grin from its face. Conducting from memory, Honeck (a former violist) brought a decade of New Year’s Day concerts with the Vienna Philharmonic to bear on the sleek drape of the strings and the patent-leather gleam of woodwind, the elegance of those artfully delayed final beats of the bar tempering the madcap scuttle of the semiquavers.

It’s a long way from Johann Strauss II’s champagne-fuelled ballrooms to the expressionist horror of Richard Strauss’s Elektra – the bookends of this survey of Honeck’s Austro-German musical heartlands. Mozart’s Piano Concerto No 25 in C major was the buffer zone, a musical blend of sweetness and seriousness of purpose in soloist Emanuel Ax’s deft hands, the work’s often intricate argument absolutely lucid. There was an ingenuous opening Allegro, supple duets with flute and oboe in the slow movement, and a closing rondo that made miniature character-studies of each carefully shaded episode.

Honeck’s own suite from Elektra traded patrician grace for the queasy chromatic turmoil of opera’s most dysfunctional family. The heroine’s triumphal dance skipped and twirled with horrible glee in cymbals and brass, Honeck leaning into the musical melodrama, while strings roiled and churned, their proto-Psycho scream announcing the deliciously bloody climax.

As a statement of intent, this concert couldn’t have been clearer. Tradition is back, and it has never sounded so exciting.