Now I would certainly not say no to a Telemann marathon myself. Or to a Haydn one. Or indeed Berlioz.

Problem with Bruckner and Mahler is that they didn't actually write all that much music in terms of hours. On the other hand if you lined up Mahler alongside some of his influences and some of the composers he influenced, crikey now that would be a weekend.

It only seems that way...

And would last for ever, and would reveal all those self-borrowings ...


It would indeed.  But this - or any other theme - would need imagination, and would need to be "curated" by someone with the knowledge and authority to do it properly.  The "marathon" approach gives the illusion of doing something special while actually doing something rather lazy and unchallenging, which is probably why it appeals to a certain type of BBC apparatchik.

As I've already said quite roundly at TOP, I feel that any such marathon is counter-productive.  The Mahler solution I'd propose would be radically different: one weekend a month from January to November would focus on, but not be dedicated to, each of the symphonies plus Das Lied. So once a month a Saturday morning BAL would cover the work in question, and the Sunday afternoons would be rejigged so that related works would be played in the request programme slot, Discovering Music would take each work apart, and the whole piece would get a transmission (perhaps from the Archives) later in the evening - at 21.00, say. The Discovering Music on the 10th might cover the various solutions for its 'completion'.

The other core programmes would not be affected, though might also contain Mahler-related material.

If anything, one may suppose that one significant factor which motivated the Chopin weekend is that someone at BBC decided that Chopin was a composer worthy of such treatment, whatever one may think about some of the results of the programming. I imagine that the exercise - as with the other composer marathons that preceded it - might always risk being regarded as suspect if for no other reason than that no one can ever do much more than "dip in" to it; for all that Chopin's work, if stretched end to end (without the aid of Dorothy Parker!), occupies considerably less listening hours in itself than does that of any of his BBC composer marathon predecessors, it would be hard to imagine even the most hardened Chopinsomniac partaking of the event in its entirety. Furthermore (and without naming names), certain of the "supporting" content (I specifically speak other than of the music itself) was - er - shall we say somewhat less worthy than the music that it sought (or was coerced, depending upon your viewpoint) to embroider. Negatives aside, however, the series did at least from time to time serve to pinpoint the immense importance of Chopin not only to but beyond the world of pianos, pianists and piano buffs...