If Monday night’s poor turn out at the Bridgewater Hall was anything to go by the Budapest Festival Orchestra must be the best kept secret in classical music.

But what the few hundred music lovers present were fortunate enough to hear was a performance that set an extraordinary benchmark for Manchester’s 2008/09 concert season.

The programme - a single work lasting well over an hour and a half - may not have worked wonders at the box office but Hungarian conductor Iván Fischer took us straight to the heart of the vast hymn to nature that is Gustav Mahler’s third symphony.

In less expert hands this wildly extravagant masterpiece can sound fatally long winded.

The quirky titles Mahler gave to the movements, such as ‘Summer Marches In’ and ‘What the Flowers in the Meadows Tell Me’, have a charm that is all too easily dispelled.

Thankfully Fischer and his orchestra avoided the pitfalls by giving us the score simply and eloquently.

In this case, however, the miracle was that they played with an intensity, a technical security, and a range of colour that simply took the breath away.

From the most hushed string tremolos to the most ear-splitting full orchestra climaxes the Hungarians characterised Mahler’s teeming musical ideas beautifully and brought out every aspect of this symphony’s torment, rapture, and panoramic vividness.

The orchestra was joined by the ladies of the City of Birmingham Symphony Chorus and German mezzo soprano Birgit Remmert who sang Mahler’s setting of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Midnight Song from Also Sprach Zarathustra with suitable richness.

After the immense climax that ends the final movement, ‘What Love Tells Me’, her words seemed especially fitting: ‘From a deep dream I have awoken’.

Whether courageously or coincidentally the Hallé will give a concert of Mahler’s second symphony on Thursday night.

The Hallé is in fine form at the moment but the Budapest Festival Orchestra has set an extraordinarily high standard for Mahler in Manchester.