There was a moment Tuesday night at Symphony Hall when I thought that if I’d had to pay to hear the Vienna Philharmonic—and my seat on the orchestra floor would have cost upwards of $250—I absolutely would have gotten my money’s worth. It was in the fourth and final movement of Mahler’s First Symphony, the second subject, where the composer flashes back to “Blumine,” the symphony’s deleted original second movement. When he wrote “Blumine,” Mahler surely had in mind Cassel opera singer Johanna Richter, the woman he loved and lost in 1884. At a very measured tempo, Andris Nelsons built this section to an agonizingly passionate climax, right down to the wistful pair of French horns at the end. I couldn’t remember hearing it played better, or even as well.

I was actually transported by the entire last movement. The infernal opening eruption. The almost shy way the muted trumpets reannounced the main theme. The Luftpause (marked in the score) Nelsons took to underline Mahler’s audacious modulation from C major to D. The way Nelsons eased out of that big climax, and the suspense he conveyed even as the music seemed to lose the thread. The abundance of wind detail (especially the cuckoo clarinet) before the return of the “Blumine” theme, now more poignant than ever. Yet another passionate climax, and then the music striding on, triumphant, Nelsons at one point holding the baton in his left hand, seeming to marvel in what he was hearing.

Most of the Symphony Hall audience, I strongly suspect, was transported much earlier in the evening—if not by Lang Lang’s Bartók Third Piano Concerto, then surely by the first three movements of the Mahler. I was not. The barrack trumpets in the symphony’s opening bars seemed to lack energy. I missed any sense of anticipation in the introduction’s build-up. The main section of the first movement sounded easygoing to a fault. The scherzo seemed sluggish and heavy-footed; the trio featured a lot of lilt and rubato but not much tempo change. In the parody funeral march, I wanted cheekier winds, more oompah from the bass drum, more ebb and flow from the “Die zwei blauen Augen” middle section.

And yet. I reviewed Nelsons’s Mahler First with the BSO for the Intelligencer in 2017 and again in 2021. Looking back, I see I was pleased on the first occasion and positively ecstatic on the second, where, referring to the final movement’s original title, “Dall’Inferno al Paradiso,” I wrote that “Nelsons took us pretty close to Paradise” and concluded that this “was the most imaginative Mahler First I’ve ever heard. It might also have been the best. It’s certainly worthy of release on the BSO’s house label.”

The thing is, those two reviews could almost be descriptions of Tuesday’s VPO performance. I noted above that the barrack trumpets at the outset lacked energy. In 2021, I congratulated those trumpets for not rushing. The VPO French horns were as radiant as the BSO’s; the movement’s climax was just as transparent. For the Ländler, forget “sluggish”; I wrote that “the heavy-footed rhythm had thrust,” and when it came to Nelsons’s trio, I wasn’t worried about tempo, instead enjoying the way “the simpering waltz dripped irony, suggesting infatuation rather than love.” Some of Nelsons’s tempo shifts in Tuesday’s funeral march felt awkward, but when I compare the notes I took Tuesday to the two reviews, I have to think the interpretations were very similar. In 2021, I wrote, “Some conductors underplay the anguished outbreak that Mahler marks “Plötzlich viel schneller”; Nelsons did go much faster before letting the tempo drift back down.” That’s exactly what he did with the VPO. I wonder why I didn’t appreciate it.

I do believe Tuesday’s inner movements were unusually slow. In 2017, I recorded approximate timings for the symphony: 16:00, 7:30, 10:30, and 19:00. For Tuesday, I had 16:00, 9:00, 11:00, and 20:00. So perhaps my reservations were justified there. Conductors can certainly have off-nights. But so can critics. If I do get the chance to hear it again, I’ll be listening more closely.         

Jeffrey Gantz has been writing about music, dance, theater, art, film, and books for the past 45 years, first for the Boston Phoenix and currently for the Boston Globe.