The appointment of Christoph Eschenbach to head the National Symphony Orchestra may have had some unintended consequences. As Anne Midgette wondered in the Post yesterday, has the Eschenbach news deflated the significance of the first concerts led by Iván Fischer (pictured) as the NSO’s Principal Conductor? Fischer may have felt odd seeing Eschenbach’s picture on the marquees outside the Kennedy Center this week — the new Music Director will not actually conduct the orchestra again until 2010 — but fans of Fischer’s Mahler, on disc and live with the NSO, filled the Concert Hall last night, to hear him conduct Mahler’s third symphony.

The work is a sprawling hundred minutes of music alternately intense and lighthearted, conceived by Mahler in 1895 to follow a program he once described as The Joyous Science: A Summer’s Morning Dream. He took that title, which was later dropped, from Nietzsche, whose influential book Also sprach Zarathustra, just published in 1885, provided the lines of the symphony’s heart, an emotional ecstasy of self-awakening sung by a contralto in the fourth movement. Fischer’s soloist was the German contralto Birgit Remmert, who sang the part in a fine recording of the third symphony by David Zinman in Zurich. She gave a performance quite similar to her recording, guileless and wide-eyed in tone but warmed with earthy loaminess, too. The German diction was rendered clearly but not with affected over-enunciation, with the added advantage of a native speaker’s pronunciation. At moments, she lacked a crucial bit of final strength, but overall it was a moving performance.