The Vienna Philharmonic's second Prom closed with Richard Strauss's An Alpine Symphony, a work with which its conductor, Bernard Haitink, has long been associated. His championing of the piece in the 1980s did much to change then-prevalent views that it was grandiloquent and otiose. More recently, with the work now a regular part of the repertory, he's conducted it on several occasions at the Barbican, and his interpretation has become more refined and, in some respects, more striking with time.

In essence, he can be regarded as turning towards abstraction in a work most people have seen as being primarily pictorial. Strauss's vast score re-imagines memories of a teenage mountaineering expedition in terms of Nietzschean conflicts between individualism and nature. Many conductors present it as a succession of gloriously scored episodes. With Haitink, however, the emphasis has always fallen less on narrative and more on architectural shape and symphonic logic. His Prom performance was slower and more monumental than on previous occasions, but his focus on the musical argument has, if anything, also tightened considerably. Once past a ragged opening chord, the predominantly male Vienna Philharmonic played it with immense nobility.

Its companion piece was Haydn's London Symphony, No 104. Nobility was a dominant characteristic here, too, in a grand-manner performance that made no concessions to period practice, but which balanced loftiness with warmth in ways that proved constantly engaging. There was implacable dignity at the start, great elegance in the slow movement, and a minuet and trio of infinite wit and depth. The single encore was Johann Strauss II's waltz Voices of Spring, gracefully played, unhurried and full of easy-going charm.

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