Budapest Festival Orchestra Plays Mahler at Carnegie Hall

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Monday, 02 March 2026 14:21

Written by Jack Angstreich

Photo by Fadi Kheir

At the wonderful Stern Auditorium, on the night of Saturday, February 7th, I had the exceptional privilege of attending a magnificent concert presented by Carnegie Hall—the second of two on consecutive days and one of the best I have ever been to—featuring the extraordinary Budapest Festival Orchestra, under the inestimable direction of Iván Fischer, one of the world’s finest conductors. Also on the stage were a superb mezzo-soprano, Gerhild Romberger, and two marvelous choruses: the Trebles of Westminster Choir, directed by Donald Nally, and the Young People’s Chorus of New York City, led by Elizabeth Núñez.

The event consisted of a performance of Gustav Mahler’s seldom played, monumental Symphony No. 3 in D Minor, which completed its final revision in 1906. 

About the work, the composer explained that “each movement stands alone.” After going to its premiere in 1902, Arnold Schoenberg wrote to Mahler as follows:

I think I have experienced your symphony. I felt the struggle for illusions; I felt the pain of one disillusioned; I saw the forces of evil and good contending; I saw a man in a torment of emotion exerting himself to gain inner harmony. I sensed a human being, a drama, truth, the most ruthless truth!

Mahler stated that the piece “doesn’t keep to the traditional form in any way, but to me, ‘symphony’ means constructing a world with all the technical means at one’s disposal. The eternally new and changing content determines its own form.”

The original subtitles for the movements, which the composer later removed, were:

1. A Summer Morning’s Dream: Introduction: Awakening of Pan, Summer enters, Procession of Bacchus
2. What the flowers in the meadow tell me
3. What the animals in the forest tell me
4. What man tells me 
5. What the angels tell me
6. What love tells me

But, Mahler also said, “I know that as long as I can sum up my experience in words, I can certainly not create music about it.” And further: “Because of its manifold variety, this work, in spite of its duration … is short, in fact, of the greatest concision.”

The extremely long and ambitious initial movement starts dramatically with a fanfare and many portentous measures of a sometimes more inchoate character; eventually, music of a much sunnier variety displaces the gloom, building to a climax followed by a more tentative sequence that ushers in an episode of greater agitation and urgency. Another series of fanfares inaugurates another interlude of uncertainty that precedes an affirmative, march-like section that finishes triumphantly. In Mahler’s 1896 comments on the symphony, he said about this movement that it “has almost ceased to be music; it is hardly anything but sounds of nature.”

The subsequent, exquisite minuet opens charmingly and much of it has a playful, usually gentle quality; it closes softly. The succeeding scherzando is ludic too as well as joyful—a distant, posthorn solo has a certain restlessness but is evocative of a more serene perspective that moves to the foreground before the movement concludes animatedly. Citing the 1896 remarks of the composer, Jack Sullivan, in his excellent notes on the program, describes “the coda of the scherzando” as “a sudden falling again of these ‘heavy shadows of inanimate nature’ before the ‘great leap upward into the more spiritual realm.’”

The radiant fourth movement is, according to the annotator, “a misterioso nocturne for contralto on the ‘Drunken Song’ from Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra.” The jubilant, enchanting, choral movement that ensues—which, as Sullivan says, “omits strings entirely”—has transcendent moments; it is a setting of a text from the early 19th-century, Romantic anthology compiled by Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim, Des Knaben Wunderhorn, which provides a general framework uniting Mahler’s first four symphonies and was a source of inspiration for many other compositions from the first phase of his career.

In 1896, Mahler said that in the adagio finale, “God can only be understood as love,” and that: “What was heavy and rigid at the beginning has, at the end, advanced to the highest state of consciousness; inarticulate sounds have become the most perfectly articulated speech.” The movement has an extended, hushed beginning that subtly transitions to music of greater emotional intensity that climaxes before again slowly ascending to a vision of heavenly fulfillment, ending with a grand apotheosis.

The artists deservedly received a standing ovation.

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