Album: Mahler, Symphony No 4 – Orchestre des Champs-Elysées (Outhear)

The 19th-century woodwind instruments infuse Philippe Herreweghe's account of Mahler's Fourth with the thick green smell of buds and leaves.

But for the kaleidoscopic abstractions of the second movement, this is a performance rooted in the forest and in the symphonic traditions of Mahler's predecessors. Slow-burning but never sluggish, "Ruhevoll" has Beethovenian radiance, ripening into Brahmsian passion before the distended sigh of the climax.