What is remarkable about hearing Mahler’s most classicallyorientated symphony performed on instruments of the period when it was written is that the music’s strongly Expressionist subtext comes across so vividly...Altogether, this very well recorded disc is fascinating in the way it sheds new light on a familiar masterpiece.

I absolutely adored this performance...What registers immediately in Roth’s reading – and the deliciously honest playing of his band Les Siècles – is an open-faced, playful nature.

Roth's Mahler Four makes you sit up and listen with fresh ears from the very first notes of the symphony, as the unusually stark, plaintive timbre of the flutes gives a foretaste of the different colours which period instruments can bring to this music: transparency and clarity are the order of the day here, revealing all manner of inner detail which had hitherto passed me by. Perhaps not everyone will warm to the almost vibrato-free string sound in places, but I found its spare, astringent beauty a refreshing contrast to the fuller-fat recordings in my collection.

Clarity, balance, transparency and differentiation are everything on this superlative Mahler Four...The massed orchestral ranks Mahler called on in his symphonies can, with a modern-instrument band, threaten to bludgeon subtlety. Roth and his orchestra, deprived of — and liberated from — this option, audibly relish the opportunity to let the light in.

Roth’s strait-laced performance suits the symphony’s pared down textures and classical proportions well, though one suspects that later instalments of his Mahler series, if it continues, will be more revealing.