4 include a 57-minute studio album that the operatic mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade recorded with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of Claudio Abbado.

[1] Richard Osborne reviewed the album on LP in Gramophone in June 1978, comparing it with alternative versions of the "symphony of heavenly life" conducted by Otto Klemperer,[5] Rafael Kubelik,[6] James Levine[7] and George Szell.

Where Szell had acknowledged the movement's "unity in diversity" with a "steady, treading pulse" that "[refused] to ignore the thrust of the downbeat", Abbado paced the score erratically.

Figure 7 exemplified Abbado's "losing his way" at a point where Szell had managed to allow himself a liberal rubato without disrupting the music's fundamental rhythm.

His unhurried reading was "wonderfully well shaped and articulated, full of childish nightmares, with the two Trios beautifully poised and expansive".

Levine's performance of the Scherzo was just as good, although the string section of his Chicago Symphony Orchestra and RCA's engineering were both inferior to what Abbado's disc provided.

But "the St Ursula phrase soars eloquently out, the voice has a true mezzo reach for the low B flats and the end, which Abbado conducts with an affecting quiet, has, as Mahler requests, a sweet, secretive intimacy.

Abbado's LP was for collectors interested in how a conductor could turn a piece of music into something very different from what its composer had imagined and make it fascinatingly new.

Despite the advocacy of acolytes such as Bruno Walter, he wrote, Vienna had been slow to recognize that Gustav Mahler was on the same exalted level as Anton Bruckner.

None of Mahler's other symphonies was more Viennese in spirit than the Fourth, and the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra was altogether at home in its radiant happiness.

Frederica von Stade's performance of the final movement's Wunderhorn song did not spoil its innocent simplicity with unwarranted sophistication.

The charm and accessibility of Abbado's disc made it easy to imagine that the composer's popularity would continue to grow, in Vienna as elsewhere.