There’s no doubt about it. The music of Richard Wagner is intoxicating in a way that his successors, and many imitators, couldn’t quite duplicate. It was especially so for Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra patrons last weekend, who were treated to a whole evening of great orchestral excerpts from the operas—or "music dramas," as he called them, of the 19^th-century German giant. Especially so because (1): ISO music director Raymond Leppard has rarely served up Wagner in his "ten-year tenure," and (2): I can’t remember hearing such a concentration of Wagner excerpts played so well.

Leppard launched the program with the "Ride of the Valkyries," which opens Act III of Die Walküre, the second of the composer’s four-opera Ring cycle. With the brass giving the cry of the warrior maidens and the strings portraying their galloping steeds, Leppard strode through this brief, captivating tour-de-force with an appropriately nimble pace—and the orchestra gave a generally polished account, with all those difficult entrances right on target. I only failed to hear the strings cascading down those scales in the middle and at the end of the piece, beneath the din of brass and winds—an admittedly difficult balance problem.

Achieving contrast is easy in a Wagner program, and with the "Good Friday Spell" from his last opera Parsifal, Leppard moved from animation to contemplation. Though I don’t quite agree with Lawrence Gilman’s assessment of this third act interlude as "the most exalted, magnificent page in all Wagner," the composer does clothe its serenity in full blown, exalted orchestration. And there is the famous Dresden Amen motif, which permeates the opera (enough, frankly, to wear out its welcome). Using a rather rigid tempo, Leppard’s approach seemed a little hard driven; he could have savored the moments a bit more.

Back to Walküre—the opera’s last fifteen minutes are filled with singing, as Wotan says farewell to daughter Brünnhilde and leaves her comatose on a rock outcropping as it is encircled by a ring of fire. Yet the scene works well in a purely orchestral version; Leppard and his players made the suggested imagery of "Wotan’s Farewell and Magic Fire Music" quite vivid.

The same can be said for another famous interlude, "Forest Murmurs" from Wagner’s third Ring opera Siegfried. The hero is reclining and contemplating the forest’s beauty and the song of a bird, while Wagner strongly anticipates the impressionism which followed his generation. We heard excellent solo work from three ISO principals: flutist Karen Moratz, clarinetist David Bellman, and oboist Malcolm Smith.

One of the most glorious of Ring excerpts is "Siegfried’s Rhine Journey," bridging the Prologue and Act I of Die Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods). It was therefore disappointing that Leppard omitted the broadly heroic theme of Siegfried’s full awakening, cutting to the hero’s departure from Brünnhilde. Furthermore Leppard uncharacteristically raced through Wagner’s brilliant contrapuntal section—depicting Siegfried’s mountain descent through the magic fire to the river—at a tempo too fast to hear all the lines and textures; they became a blur. Still the orchestra played most of the piece with remarkable precision. This program was, if nothing else, well rehearsed.

To me the essence of the mature Wagner is the distilled, refined, and scaled back Siegfried Idyll, the only significant non-operatic piece of his later years. It contains in its 20 minutes almost every stylistic feature that makes Wagner a great composer. Beginning softly with a lullaby and using many Ring motifs, this work for small forces builds to a climactic section, which then relaxes into dreamy repose. Here Leppard’s slightly fast pace proved taut, inexorable, and compelling, a memorable performance with beautiful flute playing by Moratz and principal trumpeter Marvin Perry’s all-too-brief interpolation in the climactic section.

The only concert piece that places the beginning and end of an opera together is the Prelude and "Love Death" from Tristan und Isolde, which deals with one of the great love affairs of German legend. Here we have two sequences of building to a climax, with only the second one resolving itself. In this piece a sexual connotation is correctly inferred. As a former player in the Met Orchestra wryly observed some 20 years ago when he was making regular Indianapolis appearances: "Tristan, you know, is mainly about fucking. . ." Yet the two lovers never, as they say, get it on throughout the opera’s five hours. They only sing about it, and when Tristan dies, Isolde sings about it till she dies.

In any case the ISO music director built both sets of crescendi with an incredible power-in-reserve, making the most of the "cosmic orgasms." This carefully wrought, layered approach counts as some of Leppard’s best conducting, and was a perfect cap for the evening.

This season’s subscription series concludes with three "Spring Festival" concerts in late May and early June, all devoted to works of Beethoven.