This concert marked the opening of the New York Philharmonic’s weekend residency at the Barbican, in a season celebrating the ensemble’s 175th anniversary, and which is also its last with current music director, Alan Gilbert. There were two works on the programme: Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta in the first half, and Mahler’s Fourth Symphony in the second.

From the opening fugue of the Bartók, whose long, slow string lines were carefully measured out by conductor and players, tonal qualities seemed uppermost in Gilbert’s approach. And as the orchestra charted a steady path through its translucent and even icy textures, the piece’s inner mechanisms were revealed in music-making that insistently shone lights into the very heart of its darkness.

Mahler’s symphony came like a breath of fresh air, though this piece, too, is full of ambiguities that deepen and even contradict our immediate experience of a work, much of whose outward expression seems guileless and innocent.

This is nowhere truer than in the finale, where the soloist – here, German soprano Christina Landshamer – offers a childish account of life in heaven in a song setting a text from the folk collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn – yet again, one suffused with troubling elements.

Landshamer brought exactly the right naive and unsophisticated tone to it, even if, in places, she wasn’t quite cutting through vocally: clearer consonants would have helped. Elsewhere, the orchestra’s luminous strings, pristine woodwind, vibrant brass and dashing percussion underpinned Gilbert’s realisation of Mahler’s complex and rewarding vision.

• The New York Philharmonic ends its residency at the Barbican, London, on 2 April. Box office: 020-7638 8891.