Fifty years to the day since Richard Strauss's death, the first of Bavarian State Orchestra and Zubin Mehta's Proms invited us to reassess the composer's reputation as a lost romantic in a rational 20th century.

The three works Mehta programmed were all radical, even revolutionary, in their time. Don Juan was considered too voluptuously progressive in the late 1880s, whilst the Alpine Symphony cemented critical opinion against Strauss. In this piece, he wilfully rejected the atonal advances of Schoenberg and his own early operas, like Elektra, in favour of vivid, naive pictorialism. In a similar way, the posthumously published Four Last Songs were shockingly indulgent to the post-war modernists. But every one of these pieces now seems as familiar and inoffensive as any romantic war-horse.

And Zubin Mehta was intent on keeping things that way. His Don Juan sounded like the tone-poem that Brahms never wrote, as he smoothed over every rupture of passion and lust with a French-polisher's fastidiousness. The Alpine Symphony was painted on a suitably vast scale, but Mehta missed the pagan magic that lies behind the work's exultant nature worship - a major part of the piece, which Strauss originally titled The Antichrist because of its Nietzschean superhumanism.

But the splendour of the Bavarian orchestra was rich compensation for the conductor's self-satisfaction. The seamless finish of their ensemble, combined with the brilliance of individual woodwind and brass players, created a cloak of gossamer around Soile Isokoski's glowing soprano in the Four Last Songs.

Giles Swayne's Havoc, a Proms commission for the BBC Singers and Endymion Ensemble, is a dystopian follow-up to Cry, his creation piece. Havoc is a massive, 80-minute critique of humanist, Straussian endeavour, as Swayne's text unveils a future of apocalyptic environmental and social disasters.

Swayne translates this millennial angst into a diversity of musical references and structures. A counter-tenor, with continuo group, acts as the disaffected deity betrayed by human weakness, with music of a beatific plangency. The choir and steadily diminishing group of soloists dramatise global warming and the destruction of the rainforests with everything from African rhythms to a warped music of dried-up modernist machinery.

Swayne's eclectic ear can produce some startlingly original effects. In one section, the chorus intones a Sophocles text against an irregular tolling of percussion, as if the Ancients themselves are imparting their doom-laden prophecies.

But Swayne's attempts to unify the piece's disparate elements sometimes results in a perplexing musical idiom, which seems to long for the pure pastures of tonality but maintains a surface of grey dissonance. The epic ambitions of Havoc were well served by Stephen Cleobury and team, even with the Albert Hall's problematic acoustics.
Tom Service

***** Unmissable **** Recommended *** Enjoyable
** Mediocre * Terrible