Guardian critic goes to Gergiev concert, wishes he hadn't:
Yet he launched into the first movement with a generic, up-and-at-'em approach that gave no hint of the size of the work, or that Mahler's musical architecture might demand anything more than hyperventilating theatricality. Every climax was forced home, every speed pushed to extremes. The brash first movement was followed by a homogenised Andante, squeezed out like toothpaste; a Scherzo whose grotesqueries were played up like Prokofiev; and a last movement that was just one lurid episode after another, without a hint of the formal subtlety and expressive depth that make it the greatest and most tragic of Mahler's finales.
OC wasn't there, luckily, but she trust this account: as cool as the on-the-wagon Gergiev can be, there is probably no other major conductor who can suck so bad as he can, at any given moment.