Earlier this year, the Hamburg Symphony delivered a sinewy, pleasantly surprising performance. On Tuesday at Carnegie Hall, the other orchestra from the same town, the North German Radio Symphony, universally praised by critics as the superior ensemble, offered a major disappointment.

Gunther Schuller has said that the most difficult piece in the entire orchestral literature to conduct is Lontano by Gyorgy Ligeti, as this atmospheric work depends on contrasts of tone that explore the outer reaches of the tessituras of various instruments. Schuller says it is almost impossible for the players to hear one another’s intonation and this makes coordination challenging. Perhaps this was the problem this evening, as maestro Christoph von Dohnanyi led a realization notable for shabby entrances and wavering sustenance of individual notes. Ligeti is difficult enough for audiences to appreciate; this type of unfocused effort does his work little good.

If your ideal Mendelssohn Violin Concerto is performed by the likes of Elman or Milstein, then you would probably not have cared much for the precise but cold playing of Vadim Repin. Although he possesses a brilliant tone, this careful practitioner is not generous with his emotive gestures, and is better suited for the declarative concerto, such as the Beethoven, or the darker pieces such as the Sibelius. Here he simply sounded like a machine, and the clumsy accompaniment in the first two movements exposed this ensemble’s lack of a smooth line. The Allegretto non troppo, which should be diaphanous, was instead leaden. There are many adjectives to describe this rendition, but Mendelssohnian is not one of them.

Mahler himself conducted the American premiere of his Symphony No. 1 here at Carnegie in 1909. Judging by his own opinions of the New York orchestra of the time, that performance was probably much worse than this current one, but Mr. von Dohnanyi had his own set of problems. Mahler wrote that the opening of the piece should “not sound like music,” but this conductor followed those instructions too faithfully for too long. Not only is the string sound of the Hamburgers pedestrian at best, but the orchestra’s lack of rhythmic drive produced little more than a wash in shades of gray. Mr. von Dohnanyi committed the cardinal sin of making Mahler boring.

The second movement, however, fared much better, with the rather ugly string sound actually adding some character to the danceband music.

In the third movement, a wonderfully ghastly childhood nightmare intoned by the double bass soloist introduced the Funeral March in Callot’s Manner. Here the children’s song “Frere Jacques” is distorted into a grotesquerie inspired by the painting, which all Austrian children knew, of the woodland creatures marching back home with their kill, a hunter tied to a pole. The mood, unfortunately, was quickly broken once the entire ensemble joined in for a banausic slog, lending support to those critics of Mahler who claim that his music is really only a succession of cheap effects.

To paraphrase Dorothy Parker, the Finale ran the gamut of dynamics from FF to FFF. Mr. von Dohnanyi deserves praise for allowing his horn section to stand at the work’s conclusion, but once you arise, you must play the music. Instead, the horns hit some world-class clunkers, putting an exclamation point on a truly substandard performance.