Eric Owens dazzles in Philly Orchestra’s ‘Don Giovanni’

Operas in concert — music only, no scenery, no costumes — were highlights of the Riccardo Muti era (1980-1992), fascinating cliff-hangers for Wolfgang Sawallisch (1993-2003) due to canceled singers and blizzards, but promised a happy medium under principal guest conductor Nathalie Stutzmann at Friday afternoon’s Philadelphia Orchestra concert in Verizon Hall.

With most of the orchestra’s choral programs changed this season due to COVID considerations, the Mozart Requiem was scrapped and replaced with seven choral-less excerpts from Don Giovanni, which gets many votes for the greatest opera of all time. Like the Requiem, the opera shows Mozart peering into a dark future of reckoning with transgressions — readily conveyed by Stutzmann’s thunderous treatment of the overture.

And from there? Other than the personality, humor, and solid singing of Philadelphia’s Eric Owens as Don Giovanni’s truth-telling servant Leporello (reading the catalog of Giovanni’s sexual conquests from his smartphone), the rest of the excerpts felt sadly compromised.

Because of the opera’s sense of continuity, some excerpts had pasted-on alternative endings. Mozart’s characters were shadows of their usual selves. Stutzmann had only a tentative rapport with the opulent-voiced soprano Jacquelyn Stucker in the great “Mi tradì” aria, though tenor Kenneth Tarver — a truly promising singer — was given the leeway to add expressive vocal ornaments to “Il mio tesoro intanto.”

And where was the title character? Missing in action — hopefully having as good a time as Owens did singing about Giovanni’s escapades.

Mozart was framed by candid, intimate works by two composers known for anything but that: Richard Wagner in the Siegfried Idyll and Arnold Schoenberg in Transfigured Night. Stutzmann was much more in her element, giving highly inflected interpretations that were like operas without words.

Both pieces have explicit references to extramusical matters. Schoenberg’s work concerns a woman announcing her infidelity and pregnancy to her partner, and their finding a way forward from there. The musical structure is said to be parallel to that of the Richard Dehmel poem that inspired the music; in that spirit, Stutzmann gave the piece a strong sense of individually contrasting episodes, many of them having their own specific sound world. The less-than-immaculate playing added to the emotional fever in which this piece is steeped.

Wagner’s Idyll was written for private performance to celebrate the birth of his son, to which Stutzmann responded with great swells of Philadelphia Orchestra sound suggesting the boundless affection and wonder of early parenthood. In both pieces, though, Stutzmann’s Achilles’ heel was the rhetorical pauses written into both scores. They happened all right, but came off as a mere lack of sound and failed to speak.

Additional performances: Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. in Verizon Hall, Broad and Spruce Streets. Tickets: $22-$168. philorch.org, 215-893-1999.