Valery Gergiev's ongoing Mahler cycle with the London Symphony Orchestra has already provoked widely divergent responses, with some arguing for its supposedly revelatory nature and others claiming that the performances to date have seriously misfired. Both statements could apply to Gergiev's account of the Fourth Symphony, which contained elements of greatness and weakness in equal measure.

You could not fault the playing throughout, but first and foremost, this was an oddly conservative interpretation - one that reverted to the now largely discredited view that the Fourth is primarily a pacific work that depicts unsullied innocence with simple optimism. Mahler claimed the symphony did no such thing and famously wrote about its underlying "mysteries and horrors".

In this instance, the "horrors", at any rate, were in short supply. The shadows that gather over the games of the first movement were played down, and the death-haunted scherzo lacked irony and bite. The finale, performed as a somnolent lullaby, would probably have been more effective had Laura Claycomb's singing not been so mundane. Yet, in the slow movement, Gergiev achieved something transcendent and genuinely mysterious by propelling the music forward without losing sight of its inherent numinosity. The performance was worth it just for that, whatever you might have thought of the rest of it.

The cycle places Mahler's music against that of some of his contemporaries, and the symphony's companion piece, in this instance, was Sibelius's Violin Concerto. The Finnish composer's wiry compression is the direct antithesis of Mahler's expansive methodology. This was a point not quite taken on board by Gergiev, whose approach was too slow and too grand. Leonidas Kavakos was the expressive soloist in a performance that ultimately failed to do the work justice.