There might be a more idiotic review out there, I just don't know where
to look:

http://www.seattleweekly.com/2007-07-04/arts/seattle-symphony-orchestra-fights-bloated-mahler-symphony-to-something-better-than-a-draw.php


   Seattle Symphony Orchestra Fights Bloated Mahler Symphony to
   Something Better Than a Draw

   By Gavin Borchert <http://www.seattleweekly.com/authors/151273/>

   *To enjoy* the glories of Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 3 in D
   Minor, you have to get past its hollow histrionics, its twee
   nostalgia, a boys' choir imitating bells, and the finale's
   saccharine piety and hopelessly inadequate climax. Just because
   it's Mahler's weakest, the Third makes an interesting test for
   a conductor, and I was eager to hear what Gerard Schwarz, whose
   season-ending Mahler performances with the Seattle Symphony are
   reliable triumphs, could make of it last week.
   
   He and the orchestra met the challenge and gave a compelling and
   memorable performance of this longest of all standard-repertory
   symphonies.  In a way that feels more than a bit calculated, the
   composer inflated the 100-minute, six-movement piece with devices
   that had worked in his first two symphonies, but as his canvas
   grew more pretentious, his musical ideas got dumber: The innocent,
   folky tunes, some of which sound like they were fished out of
   Franz von Suppe's wastebasket, curdled into cuteness; the
   apocalyptic climaxes became empty noise; the epic length turned
   self-indulgent.  (As if he realized this, Mahler next took a
   radically different path with his smaller-scaled, genial Fourth.)
   
   The music keeps interrupting itself, as though Mahler, half
   admitting that his ideas in themselves might not hold our
   attention, falls back again and again on the element of surprise.
   Schwarz relished these surprises, and played them up---making a
   sudden loudness an explosion out of near-silence, rendering the
   second movement's succession of contrasting dance episodes not
   just as tempo shifts but as cinematic jump-cuts.  ....

Janos Gereben/SF
www.sfcv.org
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