Did you smell the programme? Toxic! Luckily, rancid printer’s ink couldn’t compete with the perfumes wafting from the stage during this concert from that 25-year-old wonder, Iván Fischer’s Budapest Festival Orchestra. On top form, no outfit in the world can beat them for their subtlety and multiplicity of colour, spring sparkle and rhythmic snap.

Fischer’s secret formula isn’t that secret: hours of intensive rehearsal, coupled with an adventurous collective spirit. Pints of Hungarian blood probably help too.

On Wednesday the musicians had an extra reason to shine. They were performing Mahler’s great vocal symphony Das Lied von der Erde with the effulgent young Dutch mezzo soprano Christianne Stotijn. I don’t mean to besmirch the other soloist, Robert Dean Smith, a pillar of strength as he stood and delivered with his heroic tenor, even indeed when his words required something less stentorian. But the female voice gets Mahler’s biggest, juiciest slice of the cake, and as soon as Stotijn glided, milky and lyrical, supple and warm, into Der Einsame in Herbst, you knew where the heart lay in Mahler’s songs of the earth.

Even when Stotijn wasn’t singing, she continued the poems’ stories of transient beauty, of sun and shadow, through poise and demeanour alone. That’s a special gift. Words and music fused. As she sang of the lifting breeze in Von der Schönheit, we were borne aloft with her, light and bright. The best came in the epic and visionary valediction, Der Abschied. Here she was at her simplest, most moving, resting the words without fuss over Mahler’s spare tapestry of forlorn woodwind solos, string sighs and celestial twinkles. Fischer and the orchestra played their own part, phrasing and colouring with high finesse. By the end, my eyes were moistening.

I also loved the Hungarians’ fresh attack and colour kaleidoscope in Schoenberg’s lush early bloomer, Verklärte Nacht. Fischer’s initial pulse was so slow that you wondered if Schoenberg’s night-time lovers would ever get transfigured. But they did, nudged step by step by Fischer’s subtle speed control and the Budapest Festival Orchestra’s vast reserves of dappled and mysterious tones. A transfiguring concert.

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