NEW YORK — Is the Budapest Festival Orchestra heralding a newish era of symphonic mega tours? Only days before the orchestra’s Feb. 7 performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 3 at Carnegie Hall, the venue’s next-season announcement included a full Wagner Ring Cycle from Zurich, both confronting logistics that, even in more typical touring circumstances, are barely movable feasts. And such feats — while not unknown to Carnegie, such as the Bavarian State Opera visiting with Der Rosenkavalier in 2018 — are uncommon.
Always defying practicality, Mahler’s two-hour Symphony No. 3 creates vastly different spheres of sound, animation, and purpose in each of its six movements. It’s Mahler’s least mysterious but most pictorial symphony. Roughly 200 musicians were onstage — no scrimping on size here — which could double the tour budget, were the vocal forces not local. Members of the Westminster Symphonic Choir and Young People’s Chorus of New York City, both solid groups, no doubt had limited rehearsal time but did not sound that way. (Similar combinations of local groups join the Budapest musicians for tour dates in Boston Feb. 10 and Toronto Feb. 12.)
Instrumentally, the Mahler Third is a series of highly exposed solos amid musical events where there’s no place to hide. It’s a symphony of potential mishaps, and some were heard at Carnegie Hall. But having lived with Mahler for years, the orchestra’s founder-director, Iván Fischer, is the sort who renders challenges invisible and mishaps unimportant thanks to the conceptual strength of his overall view of the piece. It was one of the great evenings this season at Carnegie.
Fischer’s approach was the antithesis of the suave, homogenous Mahler exemplified by the late Italian conductor Claudio Abbado. No artificial sense of unity was imposed upon the sprawling, 35-minute first movement, which characterizes the awakening of spring with explosive, expansive themes, marches, and fanfares both playful and menacing. Momentum interruptions — namely the silence imposed by a fermata marked “long” prior to the big trombone solo — were held much longer than usual by Fischer, with no apparent fear of losing the train of thought. Silence is one of many colors in this symphony.
In the more cogent later movements, each musical paragraph had its own tint, as if Fischer was finding worlds within worlds, allowing what might be called microscopic listening. The second movement’s dance rhythms, more rustic in past Fischer outings, had graciously moved up the social ladder. The third-movement nature studies had Fischer attending to every last woodland creature characterized in the score.
The tranquil, profound fourth movement, “O Mensch” — actually a literary expression with the lowest-density music of the symphony that forms a discreet frame for the Nietzsche text — had Fischer standing back (figuratively) and allowing mezzo-soprano Gerhild Romberger to lead the performance. She dictated how phrases began and ended, thanks to her deep, highly specific rapport with the words. She’s known for singing Erda in Wagner’s Ring, and you got that from her performance. In the fifth movement, she also gave cues to the folksy choruses, again with words shaded more knowingly than I’ve ever previously heard.
In the song-like final movement, Fischer unleashed the orchestra’s string tone, allowing it to emerge in arresting bursts. Mahler knew to give listeners something completely different from what came before in this long symphony, and Fischer underscored that with great quality of sound. It was a satisfying conclusion to one of the most adventurous symphonic narratives yet written.
