Bipolar Mahler

I will risk being a touch narcissistic and start this review with a personal anecdote. A few weeks ago, I was teaching a class on Mahler symphonies to my tutees at Oxford. At some point they all agreed that Gustav Mahler’s Fifth Symphony is “a cheesy piece”. After a bit of discussion, however, they realised that its being “cheesy” might depend on our associating it to Death in Venice, a film they considered “boring and dated”. Had they listened to David Zinman’s rendition of Mahler’s most famous work, they would have never qualified it as cheesy. What would they have said, though?

At the end of the first two movements, it was clear to me that Zinman was conducting an extreme version of the piece. He did not try to reconcile the slow and fast parts, the piano and the forte sections. He seemed to relish making the contrast apparent. I…