I just don't get Mahler!

I played in a concert last night - Mahler 5 and the Strauss 4 last songs  (contra doubling 3rd bassoon).

I've never quite got Mahler!

For a contra player the actual playing experience is something to relish because he uses the instrument so well, and there are lots of opportunities for some really good low notes - as well as some passages that test the technique to the limit - and in my case probably beyond!   And the sound of the Mahler orchestra is always astonishing - he had a remarkable ear for sonority and just listening to the way that he uses the instruments is always fascinating - so much so that in long passages it is easy to forget that you should be counting bars rests.

But I find it difficult to get a sense of what the music is really about.  Mahler's early critics complained about the scale of his symphonies and what appeared to them to be a complete lack of stylistic coherence - the most complex music side by side with fragments of popular tunes, smaltz, folk music, klezmer and landler.  Although it is fashionable to laugh at these early critics' misunderstandings I have to say that I have great sympathy for how they felt.     There are wonderful moments in this symphony - as there are in all of them  (I have now played 1.2.4.5 and 6 so I am half way there) but so often it seems to be that Mahler then descends into cliche and bombast.

And the symphony is so long.  Contra parts have lots of rests so it is very rare to have to turn pages too often within a movement - but several time during rehearsal and indeed in the concert I turn over the page confident that I was approach the end of the movement only so see that I still had pages to go.

I know that I will be condemned as a heretic by the worshipers at the cult of Mahler, but I have to say that there is probably a really good 30 minute symphony somewhere within the near 80 minutes of Mahler 5.

There - I said it!