Iván Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra in Mahler 9: individual brilliance fails to coalesce

In the notes to his 2015 award-winning recording of Mahler’s Symphony no. 9 with his Budapest Festival Orchestra, Iván Fischer describes the work as “heartbreaking” and “visionary”, with “the most tragic and beautiful ending Mahler ever composed”. These things are all true, but they are just a start. If Mahler’s Third is supposed to embody the world in all its aspects, the Ninth embodies all aspects of human emotion: rapture, tension, romance, calm, celebration, fear, anger, nostalgia, mischief, ecstasy, yearning and – yes – heartbreak. Last night at the Royal Festival Hall, Fischer and the BFO gave us some measure of this emotional gamut but fell short of delivering the work’s full impact.

There was plenty of individual instrumental quality on show, which surfaced at different times – harp notes which punctuated the first movement, muted horns giving a sense of distance, the bray of trombones, insistent repeated drumbeats from the timpani, a lovely bassoon solo in the second movement, an imposing trumpet solo in the third, after which cheeky clarinet is echoed sadly by the instruments around it. The fourth was lit up by telling solos from each of the string desk principals, as well as short cor anglais phrases that took one’s breath away.

However, the excellence of individuals was not always matched by excellence of the collective. Too often, slight timing inaccuracies prevented these individual pieces of music-making from coalescing into a perfect whole. Fischer’s conducting style was unusual. Much of the time, he did little to maintain discipline and synchronism between opposite ends of the orchestra, sometimes stopping altogether. Then, at intervals, he would burst into activity, frenzied movements urging his troops into more fervent expressivity. His orchestra certainly know this work well, so it might seem reasonable for him to eschew the need to mark time at every point, but the results, particularly in the first movement, told a different story; even the opening of the symphony came across as a little choppy and uncertain.

In that movement, Fischer was at his best when he was at his most deliberate, carefully constructing the thickening of texture at the same time as a crescendo, allowing the urgency to creep up on you and then the tension to relax. The overall performance became considerably more convincing in the second movement Ländler, the heavily accented dance rhythms of the opening changing down to a nostalgically soft repeat. The third movement Rondo-Burleske was even more vivid in its accenting, although even here, there was a suspicion of imperfect co-ordination in the cross-rhythms.

The fourth movement overflowed with melody and yearning, with particularly fine playing from high tremolando strings – this is a conductor and orchestra not afraid of their pianissimi. Fischer was able to summon a sense of synthesis of the opposing emotions, but perhaps too early; the work concludes with a series of repeated false endings, and on this occasion, it felt drawn out, with so many aching suspensions as to seem superfluous.