When octogenarian dynamo Charles Mackerras first conducted the Philharmonia in 1956, Richard Strauss's late works just about counted as new music; the orchestra had premiered his Four Last Songs six years earlier. In this series of three concerts, each including a Strauss tone poem and a Third Symphony, those songs, and Beethoven's Eroica, are saved for last. But there was plenty of Straussian lushness in the first two programmes. Lush but not lax: Mackerras doesn't wallow in Strauss, and everything is propelled by rhythmic drive. In Till Eulenspiegel, the cheeky anti-hero skipped through his exploits with the glee that only a mercilessly disciplined orchestra can conjure.

In that first programme, Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto was a little more prosaic; Lars Vogt punctuated muscular playing with passages of striking delicacy, but marred the overall effect with moments of doggedness. Schumann's Rhenish symphony, however, had a genial flow as unstoppable as the river that inspired it, and the way Mackerras let the horns blaze created surprising pre-echoes of Strauss.

The mother of blazing openings, that of Also Sprach Zarathustra, began the second concert with a seismic grumble from the organ and a barrage of timpani. Even Mackerras's energy couldn't stop this sprawling score's momentum from faltering, and the orchestra sounded unsure at times, but the strings-only passage was richly woven, the dance episode fleetingly exuberant.

From another planet came Mozart's Piano Concerto No 18, in a performance from Till Fellner that was graceful, if a touch cool. But Brahms's Third Symphony brought out the orchestra's best, Mackerras finding a plush, chocolaty, Germanic string sound that was as supple as it was sumptuous.

· Final concert tomorrow. Box office: 0871 663 2500.