Gratifying though it is that synoptic musical ventures such as Daniel Barenboim’s Festival Hall cycle of Beethoven piano sonatas are not uncommon these days, one always welcomes the brilliant one-off. As if from nowhere, though actually from Italy, came the BBC Philharmonic’s concert performance of Strauss’s Salome at Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall: a Saturday-night spectacular whose cast was that of an imminent staging at Teatro Regio, in Turin, where the orchestra’s chief conductor, Gianandrea Noseda, is in his first season as music director. It is an unusual step to try out a production in a different country, and the logistics must have been considerable, but so, presumably, was Noseda’s will to fuse his ensembles and give Manchester (and Radio 3 listeners) the benefit of his double role.

He was certainly a cynosure: a tall, lean figure with a passion on the podium, sometimes crouching down to secure a pianissimo, at other times leaping into the air as though as crazed and obsessive as the characters of the drama. And, for all the trouble of transporting the cast, it was the orchestra that dominated. Apart from Elektra, Salome’s successor and another single-span music drama of ferocious force, Strauss never wrote orchestrally with such daring dissonance and colour-istic resource. The two works are tone poems (of the illustrious sort Strauss had been producing) with staging, and it is clear that anything and everything can be rendered with instant pictorial power.

The ill wind that Herod (but no other character) feels blowing is an easy matter for Strauss, though he doesn’t resort to a wind machine. A splash of celesta effortlessly captures the silver charger on which Salome wants to see the head of Jokanaan (John the Baptist), and those extraordinary, high, pinched, single notes for double bass (the other players are silent) are like her bleats of erotic expectation before the head appears. Even the cistern in which Jokanaan is imprisoned has its decisive image – a low and dissonantly clustered chord. The passages for orchestra alone, culminating in the Dance of the Seven Veils, had an impact at Bridgewater Hall hard to reproduce in theatre-pit conditions. Thwacking and glisteningly precise in equal measure, the playing had a hard and stylish collective virtuosity, and solo contributions were no less impressive, the contra-bassoon looming large, the viola with its iterations at the start of the Dance memorably creepy.

It is fair to dwell on the orchestra in describing a concert performance, but the atmosphere generated by the singers was such that one momentarily forgot this wasa concert performance. Except for Jokanaan (the imposing Peteris Eglitis) in his cistern (at the back of the stage), none of them used a score, and their body language was evidently that of the forthcoming production. There were no costumes, but Salome, the German soprano Nicola Beller Carbone, wore a sleek outfit hinting at the paintings of Klimt, who was exercised by the story. Her youthfulness and allure were ideal for the part, and she sang it with a terrific commitment that did much to compensate for her lack of power to outsoar the orchestra when it mattered, in her disturbingly ecstatic monologue near the end.

If the mezzo Dag-mar Peckova’s Hero-dias was a somewhat recessive assumption, the tenor Peter Bronder’s Herod came insistently forwards and crackled with life. Acclaimed as the trickster, Loge, in Wagner’s Ring, he transferred something of that character’s volatile intensity to his depiction of the ruthless but self-defeated tetrarch of Galilee, who is superstitiously afraid of killing the prophet, and whose tragedy is precisely that he doesn’t have a trick up his sleeve to resist Salome’s wiles. But he has the last word. His abrupt “Man töte dieses Weib!” (“Kill that woman!”), curtailing the action and completing the tremendous 90-minute unfolding, was the shattering surprise it has to be. Just before the final notes, the house lights went down to reveal, in front of the organ, a luridly lit Jokanaan head, the performance’s sole concession to decor.

One was left with the eternal questions about this opera. Is it as moving as it is impressive? Is it moving at all? I’m not sure, but was struck by Michael Kennedy’s suggestion, in his note, that it finds “a kind of aesthetic glamour” in “the cause of perversity presented almost as innocence.” Which, as he says, is “no mean feat”.

Editor's choice

• U2 at Nou Camp Stadium, Barcelona
• The 50 Best Movie Villains
• The 15 golden rules of theatre etiquette