Despite the prevalence of Finnish conductors at the top of today’s orchestra heap – think Esa-Pekka Salonen, Klaus Mäkelä, or Susanna Malkki, among many others – it’s easy to forget that not very long ago, many of the greatest conductors in the world were Hungarian. Boldface names such as Antal Doráti, Fritz Reiner, Eugene Ormandy, George Szell, and Georg Solti all left Hungary early in their careers to make their name in the U.S. and elsewhere, as their Jewish background made it impossible to do so at home. A generation earlier, Hungarians such as Hans Richter, Arthur Nikisch and Anton Seidl found fame leading the Vienna, Berlin and NY Philharmonics, respectively.
So, it should come as no surprise that Iván Fischer and the orchestra he started and continues to lead, the Budapest Festival Orchestra, have vaulted to the top tier of world-class ensembles less than half a century after their founding. And they have done so without having to leave their Hungarian home. As I wrote when I first saw them in 2013, “they got that way not through strict adherence to established performance practice, but by taking a fresh approach to hidebound classics while championing other works long since forgotten.”
“Too often,” Fischer told WQXR in 2024 when he was at Carnegie with his other ensemble, the European Union Youth Orchestra, “orchestras play too mechanical, jaded and boring for my taste. I need involved musicians who take part creatively in risk taking.”
Once a regular guest of Lincoln Center, the BFO returned this weekend to Carnegie Hall for the first time since 2019. I missed Friday’s concert of Arvo Pärt, Brahms and Tchaikovsky, but did make it last night to hear a program devoted entirely to Mahler’s Symphony No. 3 which, at 100+ minutes, is the longest thing Mahler ever wrote. (Curious New Yorkers can see Mahler’s original manuscript at the Morgan Library.)
Compared with Mahler’s other symphonies, the third is also among his least performed, calling for a chorus of women, another chorus of boys and girls, a mezzo-soprano, and a large orchestra. Indeed, performance was the first time I’ve heard it live, though it has been featured in these pages before.
Written when he was all of 35 and still living in Hamburg, Mahler broke new ground with this symphony. Coming out of his wildly ecstatic 2nd symphony, Mahler said that he wanted the third to represent man’s harmony with nature, “a work of such magnitude that it actually mirrors the whole world.” In a video shot in 2020, Fischer tells us that Mahler originally considered calling the symphony “Pan”, referring to both the Greek god of nature and the Greek word for “everything.”
(Above: first page from the 5th movement of Mahler’s 3rd symphony, Morgan Library)
The first movement – or as Mahler calls it, Part I – begins with an 8-horn fanfare that develops over the next 40 minutes into something resembling a tone poem. (“It is the maddest thing I ever wrote,” Mahler said.) Mahler really put everything but the kitchen sink in here: crashing cymbals, piercing trumpets, rumbling percussion, and driving double bass, which Fischer split left, right and center. Even a marching band sequence appears at one point, with fluttering piccolo and thumping bass drums. In the final bars, Fischer – still youthful and energetic at 75 – drove the orchestra to a swirling rush of brass and timpani that was totally thrilling, causing some in the audience to erupt into spontaneous applause.
After a pause to bring the chorus onstage, the orchestra continued with a brief and charming minuet. The unsettling Scherzando which followed was interrupted by a sanguine offstage posthorn, played here with perfect clarity and emotion. In the 4th movement, Mahler calls for a contralto to sing a haunting nocturne based on a poem by Nietzsche, sung here with earth-mother nobility – and without drama – by Gerhild Romberger. She was then joined in the next movement by the women of the Westminster Symphonic Choir and the Young People’s Chorus of New York City in a sweet, innocent – some would say sarcastic – children’s song about Jesus and the Ten Commandments accompanied by bells and somewhat ominous brass, music which will reappear at the end of Mahler’s 4th symphony.
Everything leads to the majestic finale, which one critic called “the greatest Adagio written since Beethoven” and is one of Mahler’s finest creations. A paean to love, Mahler puts the chorus aside here for an extended instrumental rhapsody. (“For what language can utter heavenly love more powerfully and forcefully than music itself?” Mahler’s friend Bruno Walter once said of it.) Unfolding over 25 luxurious minutes, the music – marked “Slow. Restful. Deeply Felt.” – was grand, almost Brucknerian in scope, rising in a dramatic brass-driven crescendo, then collapsing into near silence before rising again. This is Mahler as mystic, reaching towards “a higher plane of consciousness” (his words) where all sense of self and attachment dissolves – something akin to what the Buddhists call anattā.
At no point did this massive hour and 40 minute symphony feel overly long. At least for this listener, all sense of time was suspended, caught up in the music’s ecstatic flow; if anything, I didn’t want it to stop. But eventually, all good things come to an end, with the final few bars – which you can see here – blazing and triumphant. After the final chord floated away, the audience shouted its approval from all corners of the packed Stern Auditorium, bringing Fischer, Romberger, and the two choral directors Donald Nally and Elizabeth Nuñez back for several curtain calls.
As my recent concertgoing would indicate, there’s no shortage of great orchestras cycling through Carnegie Hall at any given time. But I can’t imagine any of them playing with more feeling – or as Mahler would say, Empfunden – than Fischer and his Budapest Festival Orchestra.
Next week, Fischer and the BFO bring the 3rd to Boston (2/10) and Toronto (2/12); tix and info available at those links.
More pics on Instagram.