Can music tell stories without words? Yes, according to Richard Strauss, whose tone-poems spin purely musical yarns as detailed as those in his operas.

His Sinfonia domestica re-creates a day in the Strauss family home and, like life itself, is by turns trivial, touching and irritating but there is also surging passion, including strenuous sex, as well as humour, such as baby’s bath-time.

The music, though, must stand without its narrative scaffold. Indeed, Donald Runnicles’s performance with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra brought out so much detail that you had to forget the plot for fear of missing something.

His players responded as virtuosos, with telling solos at every turn. He even made light of Strauss’s reluctance to end the piece, so that the repeated false finishes seemed entirely coherent.

Runnicles is the orchestra’s new chief conductor; the exuberance of this performance suggests that it will be a fruitful partnership.

Sinfonia domestica requires a vast orchestra. Mozart’s Piano Concerto No 20 works on a smaller scale but with no loss of emotional impact.

Runnicles brought out the operatic menace as well as the ineffable sadness, while soloist Shai Wosner, at the beginning of his career, showed that he is already his own man in terms of phrasing, emphasis and occasional decoration. He provided his own cadenza in the final movement, and while it may not have been stunningly original, it worked, which isn’t always the case.
Runnicles opened with John Adams’s Slonimsky’s Earbox, given a hard-driving workout that gathered dangerous momentum. Runnicles kept it on track, his orchestra playing with a freedom that verged on abandon.

Repeated on BBC Radio 3 on Thursday September 10 (www.bbc.co.uk).