Running somewhere between 90 and 110 minutes, and calling for a mezzo-soprano, a women’s chorus, and a children’s chorus, Mahler’s Third Symphony is not a work you expect to experience live every year. We enjoyed a fine presentation from Iván Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra this past February. In April of next year, barring a change of heart from the Board of Trustees, the Third will mark the last time Andris Nelsons conducts the Boston Symphony Orchestra as music director in Symphony Hall. And Saturday at Symphony Hall, Benjamin Zander led the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra in its final Mahler Third. The poignant concert, with mezzo-soprano Sarah Connolly, Chorus pro Musica, the Radcliffe Choral Society, and the choristers of Saint Paul’s Choir School, served as a reminder of what a great symphony this is.

Zander has been doing the Third with the BPO since at least the mid 1980s; I still have a cassette tape of a performance from that period. He recorded the piece with the Philharmonia of London in 2003; he last did it with the BPO in 2022, their first time in 20 years. This outing went along the same general lines as 2022. Zander had the 80 women from Chorus pro Musica and Radcliffe seated at the back of the stage and the 35 choristers from St. Paul’s in the second balcony left area closest to the stage. He entered to tumultuous applause from the packed house, a tribute to his general excellence over the past 47 years but also in recognition that next season will be the orchestra’s last.

That 2022 reading was a leisurely one, at about 102 minutes. Saturday’s ran close to 105. I had reservations not so much about overall tempos as about the lack of tempo contrast, especially in the first three movements. In “Summer marches in,” summer didn’t march appreciably faster than winter. The two storm sections of “What the flowers in the meadow tell me” weren’t all that stormy. The creatures of “What the animals in the forest tell me” lolled and preened rather than scampering and scurrying. Absent metronome marks, it’s impossible to be sure what Mahler wanted; Zander could reasonably argue that his more minimal interpretation of “Etwas bewegter” (“Somewhat more animated”) at rehearsal numbers 4 and 10 of “What the flowers in the meadow tell me” is as legitimate as mine. But at some point in those first three movements, I’d have hoped for more energy.

The orchestra was outstanding throughout. Mahler called the opening fanfare for eight French horns “Der Weckruf!,” and Zander’s octet delivered a wake-up call. The first winter section can seem endless; Zander didn’t let it drag. Summer’s first entrance featured a perky solo from concertmaster Gregory Vitale, and when winter returned, Gregory Spiridopoulos made his trombone solo every bit as chthonic as it was in 2022. When in winter’s third appearance Mahler marks the trombone solo “Sentimental,” Spiridopoulos grew reflective; in winter’s final section, that marking is absent, and he became stentorian again before the trombone dies out in wistful surrender.

There was a lot more to appreciate in this movement. The chirpy, cheeky winds that kicked off summer’s second entrance. The French horns in Mahler’s “Weh” motif. The duet between Vitale and principal French horn Kevin Owen. The trumpets’ appropriation of winter’s opening horn call for summer. The tambourine and snare drum, though they could have been given more presence. At one point in his manuscript, Mahler wrote “Das Gesindel” (“The rabble”); Richard Strauss said that the music suggests a May Day assembling of the proletariat on the Prater in Vienna. There’s certainly a sense of an undisciplined summer marching off in all directions before finally getting it together. Zander’s reading wasn’t exactly civilized, but it could have been more rabbly.

He didn’t, on the other hand, hold back when it came to the coda. Mahler writes “Drängend” (“Pressing forward”) and then “Sehr drängend” (“Pressing forward still more”). Zander suddenly accelerated. He’s not the only conductor to race to the finish line, but I wonder whether the gradual and modest speeding up of, say, Fischer’s Budapest Festival Orchestra recording doesn’t better convey a sense of pressing forward.

Mahler called for a pause after “Summer marches in.” James Levine, when he conducted the Third with the BSO, used to have an intermission at this point. When Nelsons did the Third here in 2018, he sat in the chair the mezzo would occupy while the women’s choruses filed in. Saturday, as in 2022, the women were already in place. Zander sat in an empty chair for about a minute; then Connolly entered and sat, and he took the podium and resumed.

For “What the flowers in the meadow tell me,” Mahler wrote “Tempo di Menuetto,” but he added “Sehr mäßig. Grazioso. Ja nicht eilen!” (“Very moderate. Graceful. Do not hurry!”) On his Philharmonia recording, Zander made a quickish minuet of this movement. Saturday’s reading, like the one in 2022, was moderate and graceful, more waltz or Ländler than minuet, with gentle rainfall in the storm trios. There was, at least, plenty of rubato and Viennese lilt. The brief rute trills in the second trio didn’t emerge very clearly, but I enjoyed watching one of the percussionists whack his bundle of sticks against the bass drum.

“What the animals in the forest tell me” went at a similar relaxed clip. Here the marking is “Comodo. Scherzando. Ohne Hast.” (“Comfortable. Playful. Without haste.”), so one could argue relaxed is what Mahler intended. The upper winds, particularly the piccolo that starts it off, were playful enough, the main section of the movement built to a raucous climax, and, foreshadowing the offstage posthorn episodes, Dana Oakes contributed a series of brilliant trumpet solos.

The posthorn part itself has always been problematic. Mahler initially wrote it for trumpet, then changed to flügelhorn before finally deciding on the posthorn, which looks like a miniature French horn. BSO principal trumpet Thomas Rolfs owns a posthorn and played it in the orchestra’s 2018 Third. Most conductors settle for trumpet. In 2022, BPO trumpet-section member Andrew Sorg got a good result playing a D trumpet with a flügelhorn mouthpiece, and he did that again Saturday. As in 2022, he seemed to have positioned himself outside the second balcony right door closest to the stage; the sound was distant but not faint and made a sharp contrast with Oakes’s clarion trumpet. Once he was done and the strings had chimed in with an irresistibly sweet postscript, the movement gathered energy. At the point where ff brass allude to the apocalyptic call from the finale of Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony, the women’s chorus rose, their movement rendered inaudible. Even though they don’t sing till “What the morning bells tell me,” this was the right moment for them to stand.  

Saturday marked Sarah Connolly’s third Mahler appearance with the BPO, following Das Lied von der Erde in 2022 and the “Resurrection” in 2024. Her warm, disarming performance of “Urlicht” on the latter occasion made me think she’d do well as the pentitent of “What the morning bells tell me,” and she did. Before that, however, came “What night tells me.” Holding her score at waist level and barely glancing at it, she sang Mahler’s setting of Friedrich Nietzsche’s “Mittersnachts-Lied” with human pain and yearning against an orchestra that was atmospheric but not quite at the “Durchaus ppp” Mahler requested. The tempo marking here is “Sehr langsam” (Very slow”); Zander’s nine and a half minutes seemed just right. This movement features Mahler’s enigmatic “Vogel der Nacht” (“Bird of Night”), his reference to the glissando-like bird call that the oboe makes four times and the English horn once. It’s been suggested he had the European tawny owl in mind, and listening to Nancy Dimock’s oboe and Alessandro Cirafici’s English horn, I could see why.

For the BPO’s 2022 Third, still in the shadow of the Covid pandemic, the choruses wore masks, with the unavoidable result that enunciation in “What the morning bells tell me” was somewhat muffled. It didn’t seem much crisper Saturday, or perhaps the orchestra wasn’t quite soft enough. Connolly, however, was radiant in “Ich hab’ übertreten di zehn Gebot” and “Ach konn und erbarme mich,” and the St. Paul’s choristers were earnest as well as “keck” (“bold”) singing “Liebe nur Gott in alle Zeit.”

In 2022, Zander was at his best in the concluding Adagio, “What love tells me.” That was true again Saturday. He set a measured pace, and the F-sharp-minor intrusions of suffering and unbelief could have been quicker, but the music flowed, Owen’s French horn provided lush counterpoint, and there was genuine panic in the F-sharp-minor climaxes, Zander underlining the “Weh” motif in the French horns and the anguished descending phrase Mahler borrowed, perhaps unconsciously, from the Adagio of Hans Rott’s Symphony in E. After the final crisis, Lisa Hennessy’s flute released the tormented soul to rise to God. The closing page calls for “Gesättigen, edlen Ton” (“Saturated, noble tone”) from the brass, and they delivered, a fitting end to this distinguished orchestra’s last-ever performance of Mahler’s supreme achievement.

As has been its custom of late, the BPO livestreamed the concert. The video will be available for a few days, I imagine; the sound is excellent and the camerawork is alert to the solos.

Link to video HERE

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.