The Classical Review

No one ever accused Gustav Mahler of taking the easy route. Even so, the Austrian composer’s Symphony No. 3 develops a programmatic concept that stretches the genre almost to its breaking point.

Completed in 1896, the sprawling, six-movement score is the composer’s longest and perhaps most audacious musical undertaking, with a Dante-esque program that traces a course from the depths of the earth to the vistas of the heavens. Everything is tied together in a luminous finale that Mahler originally subtitled “What Love tells me.”

On Tuesday night at Symphony Hall, the Budapest Festival Orchestra and conductor Iván Fischer capped a stupendous traversal of the larger work with a reading of that movement that was so warm, natural, impassioned, and radiant—both tonally and expressively—as to transform even a hardened cynic into a believer.

Love, in this telling, is beautiful and vulnerable, yes, but it’s no Hallmark Valentine’s Day card—or even necessarily romantic. Rather, it’s a phenomenon marked by strength, struggle, perseverance, and creativity, as references to stormy moments heard earlier in the symphony make clear. Sentimentality may have its place, but that characteristic doesn’t explain the Third’s triumphant, iridescent D-major final cadence.

Though there’s no such thing as definitive Mahler performance practice, Fischer and the BFO make one think that there is no better way to play this music. The group, which is in the midst of an American tour and was presented in Boston by Vivo Performing Arts (formerly the Celebrity Series), boasts a chemistry of the first rank, their camaraderie as evident in their phenomenally flexible playing as in their ready eye contact.

Also impressive were the real-time reactions to the music at hand: not every orchestral horn section exchanges nods and looks of approval among themselves when one of their number nails a tricky lick. On Tuesday night, that practice was the rule, not the exception.

Fisher, who co-founded the BFO with Zoltán Kocsis in 1983, is a commendably unprepossessing maestro. Cutting a profile that puts one in mind of both Pierre Boulez and Eugene Ormandy, he is clearly in charge. But, like Kirill Petrenko in Berlin, he manages to get astonishing results from his forces with a minimum of gestures: the posthorn solos in the Third’s Scherzo, for instance, were virtually unconducted. Yet the orchestra’s accompaniments proved hypnotically pure, rhythmically tight, and devastatingly inward.

Most remarkably, though, conductor and orchestra have thoroughly inhabited this music. Tuesday’s account was not so much played through as lived out: for pacing, color, and textural clarity, it was practically flawless. The discursive first and third movements never lost their way. Neither did the finale get bogged down in the weeds of too-slow tempos or muddled phrasings.

Throughout, the BFO relished the Third’s sense of space and sonority. That 35-minute-long opening part unfolded like an IMAX theater for the ears, each section of the ensemble defining their distinct tonal areas and, in the process, painting a sonic portrait that sounded three-dimensional. A similar result obtained in the Scherzo, whose vigorous counterpoint emerged with an arresting degree of character and depth.

Though theirs was a deeply songful interpretation—the first-movement trombone recitatives were magnificently lyrical, the Minuet utterly graceful and shapely—the BFO also leaned into the raw earthiness of Mahler’s writing. Across the night, the strings’ sul ponticello articulations were models of iciness while the score’s explosive moments rightly thundered. The Scherzo’s coda, for one, was thrillingly harrowing.

Mezzo-soprano Gerhild Romberger, who was visibly swaying to the livelier parts of the last from her seat next to the podium, intoned the fourth-movement Nietzsche setting (“O Mensch! Gib Acht!”) with bronzy resonance. She was the vocal star of the fifth movement, as well, imbuing her penitent lyric with touching urgency.

Meantime, the Boys of the St. Paul’s Choir School and members of the Boston Lyric Opera Chorus navigated their parts in that section capably, if not spectacularly; the latter’s vibrato-heavy angels sounded a touch more matronly than heavenly. Nevertheless, Fischer and the BFO delivered an accompaniment of colorful, stylish delicacy.

Challenging as Mahler’s 100-minute-long score is for its performers, its dense musical-philosophical ruminations can be just as heavy a lift for its hearers, especially when presented intermission-less, as on Tuesday. Yet the night’s full house returned the BFO’s focus with a palpable concentration of their own. While Boston audiences aren’t known for being generous with applause, this one was different, unleashing a near seven-minute-long ovation on Fisher and his forces once the last chord faded into the rafters.

Vivo Performing Arts presents pianist Mao Fujita playing music by Beethoven, Wagner, Berg, Mendelssohn, and Brahms at 7:30 p.m. February 19 at Pickman Hall. vivoperformingarts.org