Larry Rachleff may have an aversion to Wagner the man, but he sure knows how to conduct the music of Wagner the composer. Rachleff opened last night’s concert by the Rhode Island Philharmonic at Veterans Memorial Auditorium with a lush, glowing account of the popular Prelude and Love-Death from the Wagner opera Tristan and Isolde.

It was the first Wagner he has tackled during his dozen years on the podium here — because of the composer’s anti-Semitic stance. Rachleff is Jewish.

But in performance, he seemed to set aside politics and get right to the heart of the music.

Rachleff took plenty of time to lay out those sighing chords in the Prelude, leaving plenty of daylight between them. And he built the music to towering heights. It was a performance that was all about longing, all about passion.

It also gave Rachleff a chance to show off the strings, and in particular the cello section, which sounded glorious.

After the Wagner were renditions of Gustav Mahler’s dour Songs of a Wayfarer with the Texas-based baritone Donnie Ray Albert in the solo roles, and Mendelssohn’s so-called Scottish Symphony, which hadn’t been done here since 1964. Said Rachleff, that’s practically a premiere.

The Mahler is an early set of four songs written for voice and piano when the composer was 24 and involved in an unhappy love affair with a soprano named Johanna Richter. Later, in the mid-1890s, he orchestrated them.

Only the second song, “I Walked Across the Fields This Morning,” is upbeat and hopeful. Mahler fans will recognize is lilting tune as the theme of the opening movement of his First Symphony, The Titan.

But the other three are a tad gloomy. In one, the wayfarer of the songs likens his emotional pain to a red-hot knife thrust into his chest.

Even though the lyrics are not particularly cheery, the music is wonderful, especially in the hands of someone such as Albert, who managed to combine lyricism with drama in his delivery.

Albert, 58, first came to public attention back in the mid-1970s, when he sang the role of Porgy in the Houston Grand Opera’s legendary production of Porgy and Bess. The 1977 recording of the opera featuring Albert in the lead won a Grammy.

He was not quite Porgy last night. But he sang with lots of heart and a nice sense of control, getting a ringing sound in the upper registers, a place where singers with voices as big as Albert’s don’t often go.

The Mendelssohn, written during a sojourn to Scotland, was the closest thing to a showpiece in this program of otherwise somewhat restrained music.

Most people know Mendelssohn either for his violin concerto or the sunny Italian Symphony. But the Scottish, which is strung together as one long, uninterrupted work, has some lovely moments, in particular the brisk, skipping second movement, which uses the short-long rhythm of Scottish folk music.

cgray@projo.com