Iván Fischer’s Budapest Festival Orchestra Illuminates Mahler’s Third

Iván Fischer led the Budapest Festival Orchestra in Mahler’s Third Symphony at Carnegie Hall on Feb. 7. The work, an audacious six-movement piece of about 110 minutes, demands a large orchestra as well as a women’s and boys’ chorus and an alto soloist, and remains a relative rarity on concert programs.

The first movement ran roughly 40 minutes, a murky, atavistic expanse in which melodic and rhythmic ideas surface briefly from a primordial mass before receding. The following movements climb from the untameable natural world toward a spiritual realm, culminating in an achingly radiant slow finale.

Fischer favored a delicate touch, allowing motifs to emerge with chamber-music clarity and building tension and release through subtle shifts of texture and light. Standout individual contributions included the trombonist Balazs Szakszon, the concertmaster Daniel Bard and Bence Horvath’s clarion-clear offstage post horn.

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