AMSTERDAM — To judge from the packed houses and the comportment of those audiences, each night first solemnly quiet and then madly exuberant, the 2025 Mahler Festival presented at the Concertgebouw might have been a Wagner Ring cycle. Except that instead of four nights, it was 10. And where the same ensemble would occupy the pit throughout a Ring, this prodigious undertaking rang up five major orchestras from around the world to share Gustav Mahler‘s 10 numbered symphonies and Das Lied von der Erde.
The Concertgebouw and its resident orchestra enjoy a long and distinctive relationship with Mahler and his ambitious legacy. Not only did the composer conduct the Concertgebouw Orchestra on several occasions, but its chief conductor at the time, Willem Mengelberg, was Mahler’s tireless champion and indeed presided over the first Mahler festival here in 1920, personally leading the house band in a complete traversal of the symphonies. That celebration was repeated 75 years later when the Concertgebouw Orchestra, by then under chief conductor Riccardo Chailly, shared the cycle with the Vienna Philharmonic led by Claudio Abbado and the Berlin Philharmonic under Simon Rattle.
This third iteration was planned for 2020 to mark the centennial of Mengelberg’s original festival, but the pandemic shut that down. As an enterprise of this scope — again much like the Ring — involves a great deal of coordinated planning, the postponement was not for one year but five. Mahlerites the world over were apparently fine with that. According to the Concertgebouw press office, zealots from 56 countries convened for the evening symphony concerts as well as afternoon recitals that presented every last one of Mahler’s songs. Official word was that 45 percent of ticket sales went to residents of countries across Europe as well as Japan, South Korea, and the U.S.
The lineup of orchestras for Mahlermania 3.0, May 9-18, was imposing: the host Concertgebouw Orchestra led by Klaus Mäkelä, who will become its chief conductor in 2027; the Budapest Festival Orchestra and its chief conductor, Ivan Fischer; Tokyo’s NHK Symphony with chief conductor Fabio Luisi; the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Jaap van Zweden; and the Berlin Philharmonic led in one concert by chief conductor Kirill Petrenko and in the festival finale by the Finnish conductor Sakari Oramo. It bears noting that in the same month (September 2027) that Mäkelä ascends to his new post with the Concertgebouw, he also becomes music director of the Chicago Symphony. The world-conquering young maestro watched Chicago’s two performances from the center balcony, seated next to the composer’s granddaughter, Marina Mahler.
Inaugurated in 1888, the Concergebouw’s main hall, which seats just under 2,000, has long been regarded as one of the world’s acoustical marvels, frequently compared with Symphony Hall in Boston and the Musikverein in Vienna. To experience the rich sonorities of Mahler’s orchestral works in that space was to be immersed in the music as if from amid the instruments on stage.
Mäkelä and the Concertgebouw Orchestra launched the festival in impressive fashion with an earthy spin through Symphony No. 1, a performance as brilliant and energetic as it was precise and exhilarating. The Concertgebouw Orchestra responded to its 29-year-old director-designate with a display of fine woodwinds and burnished strings. They had fun with the piece, notably in a heavy-footed ländler and a finale that exuded virtuosity.
Although the symphonies were performed in chronological order, it seems more useful here to pair them up by orchestra; thus we jump from the most infectious and perhaps the most popular of Mahler’s symphonies to the most problematic, the still controversial and surely least performed: Symphony No. 8, the so-called Symphony of a Thousand. It is the first of Mahler’s two consecutive sung symphonies, followed immediately by Das Lied von der Erde for mezzo-soprano and tenor, virtual chamber music compared with the massive forces of the Eighth, with its double chorus, children’s chorus, eight vocal soloists, and formidably augmented orchestra (four harps!).
Whereas Das Lied engages the vagaries of earthly life and our leaving of it, the Eighth Symphony is all about transmigration and the embrace of the Creator’s eternal love. The first of its two parts (about the first third of the symphony) is the Latin invocation “Veni Creator Spiritus.” The heart of the work is Mahler’s setting of the final scene from Goethe’s dramatic poem Faust — the celestial advocacy for the protagonist’s admission into eternal bliss.
Critics and academics have long debated the merits of what Mahler at the time declared his most important work, everything before the Eighth being mere prelude. This account under Mäkelä did not argue very well against historic complaints of pomposity, redundancy, and posturing. Without suggesting that Mäkelä himself isn’t convinced by the work, I can say it was the least persuasive effort I’ve heard from him in several performances with Chicago and the Concertgebouw. That maniacal hour and a half felt like a tent revival meeting, an onslaught of testifying and hallelujahs, loud and relentless.
The festival’s sleeper ensemble was the Budapest Festival Orchestra, which may be little more than a name to most American concertgoers. But it proved to be a far cry from the pick-up band its festival moniker might imply. Fischer has been the orchestra’s only chief conductor since he organized it in 1983. The orchestra enjoys a big reputation in Europe, and it has made more than 70 recordings. Its spectacular performance here of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 (Resurrection) — with the Netherlands Radio Choir, soprano Christiane Karg, and mezzo-soprano Anna Lucia Richter — elicited a stormy ovation that must have gone on for 10 minutes.
Hallmarks of Budapest’s balanced sound of solid brass, agile woodwinds, and silky strings also, for the most part, underpinned its account of the Symphony No. 5. The witty, brittle, ebullient Scherzo was a festival highlight. But it came as a shock to hear the rather wooly string texture that compromised the ensuing Adagietto, which suffered generally in Fischer’s aggressive approach. Happily, Mahler’s bravura finale, with its effusive counterpoint and close-order interplay, found orchestra and conductor back on track.
The contributions of Toyko’s NHK Symphony were night and day, in that order, starting with a troubled Symphony No. 3 that left this listener wondering whether the musicians had properly recovered after their flight from Japan. At nearly 100 minutes, the Third is the longest of Mahler’s symphonies. The epic first movement alone is roughly the length of Mozart’s Jupiter end to end. It’s a challenge in terms of both pacing and endurance. Luisi, whose directorship was recently extended to 2028, did not appear to have the same commanding perspective on the Third that he clearly evinced the next night with the Fourth Symphony, which was altogether charming.
Actually, it was a fascinating leap from the massive aspect of the Third Symphony to the fragile profile and concision of the Symphony No. 4. From its effervescent first measures, Luisi had the work’s essential buoyancy and expressive understatement elegantly in hand, and his orchestra responded with refinement and aplomb. The third-movement variations, arguably the heart of the work, unfolded with both the grace and impulsiveness that place this music among Mahler’s finest patches. Soprano Ying Fang was the beguiling soul of innocence in the fourth-movement song “Das himmlische Leben” (The heavenly life).
As Mäkelä watched from the far balcony, his “other” orchestra, the Chicago Symphony, lit into Mahler’s Symphony No. 6 under the driving hand of van Zweden, for whom the event was something of a homecoming. An Amsterdam native, the conductor, 64, once served as concertmaster of the Concertgebouw Orchestra, starting that appointment at 19. Leonard Bernstein encouraged van Zweden to pursue conducting. He has held a number of directorships, including that of the New York Philharmonic, and often appears with the Chicago Symphony.
Mahler’s Sixth Symphony is tricky to bring off, with its long stentorian first movement leading directly to a scherzo of much the same character. The composer waffled about which movement he wanted second, the scherzo or the soaring, emotionally heated Andante moderato. He finally settled on Scherzo-Andante, and that’s how most conductors do it, but that choice poses the danger of loud-and-relentless times two before finally getting to the Andante’s respite. The Chicagoans played it impeccably, but the storm felt unremitting and dreadfully loud. Which made the Andante’s ultimate harbor all the more welcome in its luminous depth and burnished surfaces.
Van Zweden’s more indulgent embrace of the Symphony No. 7 allowed the Chicago virtuosi to spread their wings in a performance of mystery, eloquence, and wit. The middle movements — a ghostly scherzo framed by two Nachtmusik — unfolded as mystic delights, a triple showcase for radiant strings and pinpoint wind ensemble work. But the real virtuosic gem was Mahler’s dazzling, crazy-quilt finale, a contrapuntal marvel that van Zweden and the Chicago Symphony tossed off with winning panache and quite a display by the orchestra’s vaunted brasses.
The festival’s last two nights were thrillers and both belonged to the Berlin Philharmonic, albeit under different conductors. Petrenko led an electrifying performance of the Symphony No. 9, its ruminative outer movements framing a headlong sequence of Ländler and Rondo-Burleske, both taken at blistering speed and both reveling in riotous color. But it was the Berliners with Oramo, standing in for the ailing Daniel Barenboim, that may linger longest in memory.
Their program opened with the largely completed Adagio from Mahler’s 10th Symphony, an expansive account at once refined and searing — punctuated by the famous fortissimo chord of shattering dissonance that seems to crystallize the composer’s ill-starred life. The Adagio surely would have been the high point of the festival but for the work that followed: Das Lied von der Erde, with incandescent performances by mezzo-soprano Dorottya Lang and tenor Benjamin Bruns. Oramo’s meticulous support of the singers together with the Berliners’ resonant playing, by turns gossamer and extravagant, crowned the festival as one might wish: in an ideal perspective on the capstone of Mahler’s works, at once existential and transcendent, inebriated and radiant.
The Concertgebouw’s fourth Mahler Festival is already in prospect, though tickets are not yet on sale. It’s planned for 2050.
