Symphony No. played by the BBC Symphony Orchestra
Leader, Hugh Maguire
Conducted by Charles Mackerras
See facing page
Concert given in BBC Studio 1, Maida Vale, London. Requests for tickets to [address removed], enclosing a stamped addressed envelope.

Mahler's Fifth Symphony
Musical history is full of virtuoso performer-composers, but I think Mahler must have been the first virtuoso conductor who was also a great composer. His knowledge of the orchestra as an instrument in the conductor's hands, his sense of the theatrical and the dramatic under concert-hall conditions, and his sure feeling for the natural and effective treatment of every instrument, make every one of his works something for player and conductor to revel in. One feels that every phrase and each of his copious remarks in his scores is the product of personal experience of orchestras.
Mahler first conducted his Fifth Symphony himself and like most of his works it seems to deal, although here not expressly, with Man's striving Dal Inferno at Paradiso. The despairing Funeral March which begins the symphony recurs in the second movement, as Mahler almost attains the heights with his angelic D major trumpets, only to be cast down suddenly into the murky depths of fluttering cellos, basses, and timpani. The scherzo must be the longest and most complex of any symphony; conversely, the slow movement, the Adagietto, is one of Mahler's simplest inspirations.
In this symphony, Mahler's Hero seems really to attain Paradise. He makes out of a few nursery-rhyme-like tunes a huge contrapuntal Rondo-Finale, ending in a triumphant blaze of glory. CHARLES MACKERRAS