The solution has been to introduce a degree of innovation, which is certainly nothing new to Klara, the Brussels leg of Festival of Flanders, the region-wide classical and new music festival. Among the several municipalities that take part with their own programmes, its Brussels and Ghent that really know how to bring the genre to the people.

So, while it's possible to hear Mahler's massive Resurrection Symphony by the Rotterdam Philharmonic under Yannick Nézet-Seguin, the same evening you can also catch Mahler Démécanisé, in which Flemish pianist Frederik Croene literally takes apart a piano to re-interpret the music of the late Romantic Mahler and the experimental Luciano Berio.

Dancer and choreographer Claire Croizé, a graduate of P.A.R.T.S. dance school, presented her homage to Mahler last year, in fact, in a piece called The Farewell, based on Mahler's Der Abscheid. So this year she brings Vor deinem Thron, which features extracts from Bach works, including the Art of the Fugue and the St Matthew Passion.

Croizé's work is fragile but also rigorous, her stamina remarkable. "My solo dance is not a battle with the music because then I would be the loser," she says. "But it's also not a representation of it either, because that would be meagre stuff." She's accompanied by the local Baroque orchestra B'Rock.

Mahler also steps aside to allow an homage to a Flemish composer. Philippe Boesmans was born in 1936 Tongeren and studied at the conservatory in Liège. Previous work is based on the likes of Shakespeare, Strindberg and Schnitzler, a contemporary of Mahler and another star in the firmament of Vienna; they had both risen out of Leopoldstadt, the then Jewish quarter of the notoriously anti- Semitic city.

The Ensemble Musiques Nouvelles presents Chambres d'à côté, the world première of a suite by Boesmans in which the composer steps outside the frame- work of musical convention. The work is inspired by exile, by ornamentation and by Debussy.

Two of Mahler's most enduring works also form part of the festival programme. Das lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth) was called a symphony by Mahler; it was composed between his Eighth and Ninth but never numbered as such. It is unusual in featuring, alongside a full orchestra, a tenor and alto or bari- tone soloists throughout, although other symphonies had vocal passages.

Mahler had been very much inspired by a book of Chinese poetry translated into German that appeared in 1908; it struck the composer by its treatment of earthly transience and the constant shadow of human mortality.

Just one year before, a heart defect had been diagnosed, and the Mahlers had lost their daughter Maria to scarlet fever and diphtheria. In the same concert, Gavriel Lipkind plays Ligeti's Sonata for solo cello. The Lipkind Quartet, meanwhile, will perform Mahler's Piano Quartet, one of the few exceptions to the song-symphony output.

The Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children) from 1901-1904 were written by Friedrich Rückert after two of his own children died of scarlet fever. Mahler took five of Rückert's 428 verses and set them to music before his own daughter's death; those he selected reflect the stages of grief: anguished outbursts, a fantasy the child may be revived, resignation and finally transcendence.

The irony that he was composing them at the time of the birth of Maria, never knowing she would become their subject, was not lost on Mahler, who told a friend, "I placed myself in the situation that a child of mine had died. When I really lost my daughter, I could not have written these songs any more."

The song-cycle here, however, has been handed over for reinterpretation by Champ d'Action, a Flemish ensemble set up in 1988 by Serge Verstockt, who, with the help of percussion, electric guitars and singers, will attempt to put a new slant on Mahler's tragic work.

In about 1907, Mahler's heart defect was diagnosed, and he was ordered to refrain from vigorous exercise - one form of which had reputedly occupied him greatly before his marriage with many a young woman who wanted to sing with the opera. Mahler's wife Alma, who described their marriage as akin to being on a boat tossed about by the waves, later began an affair with Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus school. Mahler, in distress, contacted Sigmund Freud for advice.

All of which is to say that the duo Eric Bosgraaf on recorder and Izhar Elias on guitar have all the raw material they could wish for in Duo di Follia, their attempt "to shed new light on Mahler's impotency and psychological state".

The evening includes the 1995 title work by Italian composer Gabriele Manca (which sounds considerably more mad than Mahler ever was). The title appears to be a translation into nonsensical Italian of "folie à deux". Other works are featured by composers like Toru Takemitsu and Tomi Räisänen, whose Stheno was premiered by Bosgraaf and Elias at last year's Klara Festival, with Bosgraaf on PVC tubes.

Outside of the concert halls, Cinematek screens films that feature Mahler's music, including Belgian filmmaker Gérard Corbiau's Le Maître de musique, Leonard Kastle's The Honeymoon Killers and Visconti's Death in Venice.

Klara Festival
7-17 September Across Brussels

www.klarafestival.be