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our mundane lives, echoing one of the remarks in the season booklet’s bouquet of enthusiastic

blurbs: “When Hindoyan conducts the orchestra, every concert feels like a holiday.”

And where was our next holiday destination? Mahler land! Every big British orchestra takes us

there, with the composer’s relatively compact Fourth Symphony most favoured at the moment,
like the Canary Islands and Ibiza. This was Hindoyan’s choice too, but the orchestra’s playing

was so vivid and freshly nuanced that it was impossible to feel jaded.

You could sense the spring air in the first movement’s pastoral landscape, so sweetly and

delicately phrased. The scherzo’s spectral delights followed, much enhanced by horn-call

beauties and leader Thelma Handy’s scurryings with her second, mis-tuned violin. The peak of

pleasure and the deepest feelings came in the adagio’s changing moods, with dynamics

sometimes tapered close to nothing and notes sustained with such tender beauty that I nearly
forgot to breathe.

Finally, we reached the last movement and a disappointment. The Czech soprano Katerina
Knezikova patiently sat through the adagio waiting for her vocal line to arrive, only to sing with

an ingredient missing when the time came. The notes were there, but not the tone of innocent

wonder, essential if the text’s purposefully child-like vision of heaven is to have any resonance.

Even so, this was still a Mahler Fourth to remember. And when you’re planning your next

holiday, do keep Hindoyan and Liverpool in mind.

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