Boston Symphony Orchestra | Renee Fleming/Richard Strauss | March 16, 2019

"It's from '2001: A Space Odyssey'," said a Boston Symphony audience member on Saturday night after a thrilling performance (led by musical director Andris Nelsons) of "Also Spake Zarathustra," the Richard Strauss tone poem that Stanley Kubrick used so famously in that film. "And it is the greatest movie ever made!" he added.

Whether it is or isn't (it is up for debate, but places high on greatest films' lists), Kubrick's use of the brief, dramatic opening section was bait for many to listen to the remaining half-hour-or-so of Strauss' famous tone poem, loosely adapted from sections of Nietzsche's famous philosophical text. This led to listening to his other tone poems, then his operas. For lovers of film, falling for the music of Strauss seems natural – isn't he something of the godfather of the classic film scores?

Certainly, the case can be made when listening to "Zarathustra," whose famous opening motif is repeated and refracted, one moment a furious fugue, another a tender waltz, in swirling bombastic (in a good way) fashion in Nelson's meticulous interpretation. Strauss' episodic and highly dramatic music doesn't sound all that much different than something Erich Wolfgang Korngold might have written in the 1930s for a Warner Brothers film. Who knows what might have been if Strauss had been forced, like many of his European peers, to immigrate to Hollywood when the Nazis came to power.

Instead, Strauss stayed in Germany and his long career - he composed music right up to his death in 1949 - has been tainted by his relationship with the Nazis, with whom he had an ambivalent relationship. His career also suffered from a kind-of stasis, as much of what he composed after 1920 was considered regressive and old-fashioned. It is ironic that the composer that was a firebrand of modernity at the end of the 19th century quickly became its most famous victim. What was interesting about the pieces played on Saturday night is that though composed 44 years apart, they differ little musically.

The concert's first part was dedicated to excerpts from "Cappricio," Strauss' last opera, written in 1942, and featured Renee Fleming, the American soprano whose greatest triumphs have been in Strauss operas, including this one which she starred in at the Met in a celebrated production nine years ago. It is likely that familiarity with the piece - the opera's final monologue - that made her performance so heartfelt and authentic. The music has Strauss at his most expansive and reflective, the latter partly due to the scene's content: a self-directed debate that its singer, a Countess, has concerning which lover - a poet or a composer - she should pick. Torn between the men, and the relative weight of their professions, she can't make up her mind to some of Strauss' most ravishing music. While she doesn't come to a conclusion, Strauss hints at one with the sublime coda played only by the orchestra, exquisitely played by the orchestra.

The concert also featured a tribute to another composer with whom Fleming has a long association, the late Andre Previn, who wrote for her one of her biggest triumphs: the role of Blanche Dubois in his 1998 operatic adaptation of "A Streetcar Named Desire." Closing the first half of the concert, which was dedicated to Previn, the soprano sang Blanche's poignant final aria, "I Can Smell the Sea Air," as a much-appreciated and heartbreakingly beautiful encore.

For more information on upcoming Boston Symphony Orchestra concerts, visit the Boston Symphony Orchestra website.