Austria Salzburg Festival 2025 [8] – Mahler: Berlin Philharmonic / Kirill Petrenko (conductor). Grosses Festpielhaus, Salzburg, 31.8.2025. (AL-L)
Mahler – Symphony No.9
This year’s Salzburg Festival unfolded with an unusual imbalance. Mozart and Richard Strauss — the city’s two musical icons — were conspicuously underrepresented. No Strauss opera appeared on the schedule, and Mozart’s presence was reduced to three semi-staged performances of the unfinished singspiel Zaïde.
But the concert programs compensated with their customary wealth, including three very different encounters with Gustav Mahler, a composer never directly tied to Salzburg yet this year indispensable to its festival identity.
The Vienna Philharmonic, the festival’s anchor ensemble, offered the Adagio from Mahler’s unfinished Tenth Symphony under Andris Nelsons. The Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam, led by its chief conductor-designate Klaus Mäkelä, presented the Fifth (see a review here). And the Berlin Philharmonic, under Kirill Petrenko, closed the festival with the Ninth.
Each performance revealed not only Mahler’s protean voice but also the sharply contrasting musical identities of these ensembles and conductors.
Mahler may have led the Vienna State Opera (or Court Opera as it was then), but his symphonies found warmer first receptions abroad — in Leipzig, Amsterdam, Prague and Munich. The Vienna Philharmonic’s account of the Tenth’s Adagio seemed to hint at that ambivalence. Nelsons drew on the ensemble’s trademark warmth and sheen, particularly from the strings, enveloping the music in the opulence that also suits their Strauss so well.
Yet the drama felt softened. The movement’s searing dissonances and wrenching climaxes emerged more as ornamental colour than existential crisis. It was music-making of the highest polish, but paradoxically, almost too beautiful.
By contrast, the Royal Concertgebouw’s sound was more transparent, its woodwinds sharply profiled. Mahler’s writing for high registers emerged vividly. Mäkelä, just 29, displayed technical mastery, balancing textures with precision.
But his reading of the Fifth remained episodic — a chain of striking moments that never coalesced into an organic whole. The Adagietto floated delicately, the Rondo-Finale burst with energy, but connective tissue was missing. Mäkelä’s gifts are undeniable; perhaps only time will give him the depth to bind this vast canvas together.
It fell to Petrenko and the Berlin Philharmonic to deliver the most complete Mahlerian statement. The Ninth Symphony, with its intimate confrontation with mortality, has long been a touchstone for this orchestra. Herbert von Karajan made it a meditation steeped in Zen detachment; Claudio Abbado offered increasingly inward journeys as illness overtook him; Simon Rattle shaped luminous, modernist architectures.
Kirill Petrenko, facing a tradition laden with ‘muscle memory’, nonetheless forged his own path. His brisk, taut Rondo-Burleske crackled with risk, evoking not Viennese charm but the corrosive satire Mahler embedded in it. The Adagio finale unfolded with glowing warmth that gradually dimmed to hushed nothingness — not morbid, not sentimental, but plain and devastating.
The Philharmonic played with its customary precision and colour, but also with intensity that never slipped into mere beauty. Solos from Emmanuel Pahud (flute), Yun Zeng (horn), Bruno Delepelaire (cello), Diyang Mei (viola), and concertmaster Noah Bendix-Balgley drew ovations. Yet the greater triumph was collective: a performance of coherence, meaning, and rare emotional weight.
Salzburg will hear more from Berlin. Beginning next year, the orchestra with be at the centre of the separate Easter Festival’s programming. Plans include the staging over five years of Wagner’s Ring operas by Kirill Serebrennikov, with Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron daringly placed in between. Mahler remains present, with the vast Eighth Symphony set to resound.
In a festival light on Mozart and Richard Strauss, Mahler emerged — thanks to three orchestras and their three visions — as the unexpected centre of gravity.
Antoine Lévy-Leboyer