It’s been over 21 years, but finally the wait was over. In the fall of 1976 Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 4 in G (1900) was given a terrible performance (I still remember it vividly) by the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra under guest conductor James Conlon—and they haven’t played it since. That is, till last weekend. This time—and reportedly for the first time—ISO music director Raymond Leppard tackled Mahler’s most engaging symphonic opus, which is also to me—an admitted non-Mahlerite—the finest distillation of the late Romantic Austrian’s special art.

Soprano Juliane Banse joined the rather large orchestra (minus trombones and tubas) in the final movement, which the composer slightly recast from the song "Das himmlische Leben" ("The Heavenly Life") from his earlier written and well known cycle Das Knaben Wunderhorn (Youth’s Magic Horn). Having appeared once previously with Leppard and the ISO in 1995 in a more supportive role in Haydn’s The Seasons, Banse took center stage this time for a work that has become almost her signature piece. And for a good reason: Mahler’s registration lies perfectly within Banse’s optimum range. She paints a picture of heaven from a child’s perspective, yet with just enough darkness in her voice to suggest that Mahler--11 years before his death—didn’t himself quite believe in the blissful, heavenly existence characterized in the verses. And frankly neither does the mood the composer projects throughout this intense, culminating movement. As the harp plunks its way into silence in the remote key of E major at the symphony’s end, there is an ineffable sadness, a yearning that is far more telling to me than the overwrought, almost maudlin way Mahler’s later works—the Fifth, Sixth, and Ninth symphonies, the song cycle Das Lied von der Erde—deal with his death obsession.

Despite Banse’s appearance only in the fourth movement, the whole symphony—which, with Leppard’s relaxed pace, took exactly an hour to play—is irradiated with song. Not so much with specific tunes, as we heard last fall when Leppard conducted Mahler’s First Symphony, but rather with an uninterrupted stream of lyric writing—at first limpid and carefree but later tinged with just enough melancholy to "embrace the world," to paraphrase the composer.

Opening with sleigh bells (or "barnyard sounds," in the view of an early 20^th-century British musicologist who didn’t like the work), the first movement seems to need a buoyantly light approach to communicate its bucolic nature. At first I thought Leppard’s tempo was slow, almost too slow to achieve this. Then, in the development, as the material became a little more serious, there were a few moments when Mahler’s vast orchestral machinery got a bit unwieldy for the conductor and his players—both in ensemble balance and in precision of attack. But I found that both the general tempi and these incidents were more than offset by ensemble clarity, a Leppard trademark if there ever was one. In fact, the transparency of texture he got throughout the work was a marvel to hear; it was almost like hearing through the instruments into the heart of Mahler’s score. This was abetted by some outstanding solo wind playing, especially in the double-variation slow movement (patterned after Beethoven 's "Heiliger Dankgesang" from his A Minor String Quartet—which the Tokyo Quartet played last fall, and after the Adagio from Beethoven’s Ninth—which the ISO will play this spring.).

Leppard opened the concert with two Mozart pieces, the Symphony No. 29 in A, K.201, and the well known cantata Exultate Jubilate , K.165, again featuring Banse. The Andante from No. 29 is Mozart’s first great symphonic movement, and since Leppard was right in his element, we expected—and got—exquisitely beautiful playing from the muted strings. In fact the soaringly lyric writing provided just the right mood for the Mahler-to-come.

As did Exultate, surely the best work the 17-year-old composer had written to that point. Frankly Banse seemed taxed, not so much in her ability to handle deftly Mozart’s widely ranging registration with perfect intonation and a consistent vibrato, but in her capacity to sound equally beautiful at the extremes. Her final "Allelujah," for example, emerged on her high C as almost a shriek. Exultate works better, in my view, with a brighter, more open voice.