Make a generalization about Mahler's multilayered Fourth Symphony, the most compact and approachable of the composer's nine, and the piece will promptly refute it. Ambiguity runs deep in this music, which mingles dream and reality, innocence and sophistication, lullaby and dance of death. Just as the listener is about to surrender to Mahler's melodic caress, the basses are apt to whisper, "It's more complicated than that."

Friday's performance of the symphony by the Minnesota Orchestra, recently returned from a fruitful European tour, was a family affair; the conductor was Mark Russell Smith, whose wife, née Ellen Dinwiddie, is a stalwart of the orchestra's horn section. (The Juilliard-trained Smith, who holds positions with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and the University of Minnesota, has lately been steeped in Mahler, having led the overwhelming Ninth Symphony Thursday at the university.)

Smith's account of the Fourth was something of a patchwork. Felicities were many: the unaccustomed vehemence of Michael Gast's horn solo near the end of the first movement, Jorja Fleezanis' wicked impersonation of a street fiddler in the sinister scherzo, and the climactic moment of the great Adagio, in which, with a rush of E-major, heaven's gates are flung wide. Earlier, however, the Adagio -- "divinely gay and deeply sad," as the composer described it -- felt unduly purposeful and foursquare. This miraculous music asks to be sung with greater freedom and abandon.

Harolyn Blackwell was the soprano soloist in Mahler's final movement, which paints a child's vision of paradise in disquieting colors. Though her voice is not unsuited to the part, her words were often hard to make out, and her fast vibrato became a distraction.

Because we still look at music through a Germanic lens, composers like Jacques Ibert (1890-1962), who are less about climactic moments than about flow, remain on the fringes of the repertoire, their elegance and élan mistaken for unseriousness.

How much this costs us was suggested Friday by Ibert's breezy, sensuous Flute Concerto, fetchingly played by Canadian virtuoso Conor Nelson, who won the orchestra's 2007 WAMSO Young Artist Competition. Lit by Nelson's long-breathed phrases and luscious tone, the concerto proved a perfect foil for both Mahler and the program-opening Wagner prelude ("Lohengrin," Act I). Soloist and orchestra alike displayed the requisite finesse, though the middle movement might have sounded more plush, the last movement more animated.

Larry Fuchsberg writes frequently about music.