The Boston Globe


Music Review

BSO explores sprawling visions of Mahler’s Third

Thursday night’s BSO concert came to a sudden halt in the middle of the massive slow movement that crowns Mahler’s Third Symphony, as a chorister fainted on stage, falling off a low riser into a small space behind the trombones. Conductor Daniele Gatti put down his baton and walked off stage as the orchestra fell silent, and Gatti returned a few minutes later to resume the performance. Accord­ing to a BSO spokesman, the chorister hit her head but was OK and was being treated on site by paramedics.

The BSO’s Mahler program follows on the heels of last week’s all-Wagner program, and shared a certain affinity with it. Or as Pierre Boulez once put it: “Just as Wagner destroyed the artificial order of the opera in order to initiate a far more creative attitude to the drama, so Mahler revolutionized the symphony, ravaging its all too neatly ­ordered landscape and introducing his hallucinatory visions into the holy place where logic used to be worshipped.”

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