Prom 67: Boston Symphony Orchestra/Nelsons review - reaching for the divine

Even by Mahler’s exalted and extended standards, the Third Symphony is a colossus, the work in which he gets closest to redefining the symphony as something that “must be like the world”. He planned to give each of its six movements a title, explaining that it “begins with inanimate nature and ascends to the love of God”. He ditched the idea; but those titles remain the starting point for any successful interpretation, and they were clearly at the front of conductor Andris Nelsons’ mind during this Prom with the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

Often, indeed, the music of the huge first movement seemed to be following nature’s logic rather than being shaped according to human ideas of expression. Episodes started, ran their course, and stopped. And yet nature, and Nelsons, kept pushing onwards. A certain sense of urgency had been established at the very beginning, the horns barging in with their theme in a bald fortissimo. The brass sound was, as ever, one of the defining Boston characteristics: bright, refined – and loud. Should Nelsons have left more in reserve for the handful of really big moments? Perhaps. But the lengthy solos, trumpet and trombone especially, were beautifully done throughout.

There was the odd split note, the odd moment of shaky tuning elsewhere in the orchestra, and the marching passages in the first movement weren’t always rock steady. Yet the intensity of the performance grew. The “flowers” movement disappeared into the air like a puff of pollen; the “animals” one ended with a swagger. The fourth movement, setting lines from Nietschze and finally bringing the work into the human realm, was glowingly put across by mezzo-soprano Susan Graham, at just the right point between confiding and awestruck. And when the jauntiness of the fifth movement, sung with apt sweetness by the women and girls of the CBSO Choruses – a nod to Nelsons’ previous job in Birmingham – had given way to the endlessly unfurling melody of the sixth, there was indeed the sense that the music had got to that divine level Mahler was seeking, even if it had taken a while to reach.