As with the First Symphony, a previous instalment in the San Francisco Symphony’s Mahler cycle (2/03), the glory of this recording is the orchestra itself. The woodwinds in particular have real character – listen to the lusty squawk of the clarinets at 1'30" in the opening movement, or to the oboe’s tender entry in the Poco adagio (1'58"). The strings impress, too, covering the Adagio’s extremities with a silky, featherweight blanket of sound, and everyone makes a splendid sound when the gates of Heaven swing open.

Michael Tilson Thomas takes an affectionate, relaxed view of the score, promoting bucolic geniality over youthful animation, an approach that’s similar in its general contour to fine accounts by Lorin Maazel and Franz Welser-Möst. Tilson Thomas stretches out the Poco adagio to a controversial 25 minutes, where Mahlerian disciples Otto Klemperer and Bruno Walter both, both breeze through (relatively speaking) in about 18 minutes. Actually, Tilson Thomas begins the movement with a clear sense of motion, like a gently rocking cradle. It’s in the ‘lamenting’ second theme group that he lingers, down-playing and sometimes even ignoring Mahler’s directions to regulate the music’s ebb and flow (Rafael Kubelík made a force-ful case for textual fidelity in his fresh, frisky 1968 recording).

Throughout, in fact, Tilson Thomas is not especially scrupulous in following the letter of the score. At the symphony’s open-ing, his flutes and sleighbells slow down with the clarinets, though poco rit is printed only over the latter parts; the violins’ first entrance is much more distended than etwas zurückhaltend (‘somewhat held back’) suggests, not to mention that they don’t respect the pianissimo marking.

Finally, what I miss in this recording is an overriding sense of childlike wonder. Welser-Möst conjures this feeling of wide-eyed ingenuousness without sacrificing the music’s dramatic impact. Where he suddenly darkens the texture at the first movement’s nightmarish climax, Tilson Thomas’s version sounds merely loud.

Laura Claycomb is appropriately bright and pure-toned but hardly boyish, and her phrasing is too precious. Battle (for Maazel) is sweetest of all, though she can be cloying. And though Maazel’s slant on the Fourth is overly suave and sophisticated, the Vienna Philharmonic’s playing is, truly, to the manner born.