The Mahler Fourth stakes are growing impossibly high. Inoue more than consolidates here the impression he made on me last September with his highly accomplished RPO account of the Sixth Symphony. Whilst not perhaps a natural first-choice candidate—Maazel (CBS) and Welser-Most (EMI Eminence) can vie for that distinction—this is none the less inbred Mahler conducting: spontaneous, deeply felt and shrewd. Only those wholly at one with the style, the colour and cast of this music can succeed in making light of the treacherous corners and contrasts of Mahler's first movement. Inoue shifts, as Mahler demands, from relaxation (lovely homespun cellos, cosy in all their solos) to excitability in the blink of an eye. Where Mahler marks Frisch, ''fresh'' it is; at the start of the development, the carefree flautist really does whistle down the lane, the busy surrounding string detail beautifully delineated. The climax is exciting with the bass drum's grace notes adding vividly to the music's leaps and bounds, and there follows a marvellously uninhibited recapitulation of the second subject, strings and horns as ripe as can be.
As for Mahlerian irony, the RPO's leader strikes a properly sour note (quite literally, of course, tuned as he is, up a tone) at the opening of the second movement, the E natural in the second bar gnawing at one like the proverbial grinning skull. The twilight middle section, with Mahler's lavish portamento entirely in character, is duly rapturous, preparing our way for the dream-like adagio—very broad here (though not as broad as with Welser-Most), with intense levitating violas and cellos setting the tone from the outset. Inoue may not have the Vienna Philharmonic strings at his disposal (as does Maazel) but the RPO don't short-change him with a single dishonest bar, and that's what really counts here. Yvonne Kenny is a perceptive heavenly body, a shade too knowing, perhaps, in her well-rounded colouration of the text (Inoue gives her plenty of room to shape the words making for the sharpest possible with his scampering animal life). But it's lovely singing all the same, the affecting flutter in the voice really coming into its own for the final stanza. Not a great Mahler Fourth, then, but another very good one.'