Gianandrea Noseda conducts the Philadelphia Orchestra

The Fourth Symphony, composed in 1900, is more connected to its predecessors than its successors, but it is with the Fifth that Mahler complicated his art. It is a score that bristles with detail, whose varied voices cut in, overlap, and interject, like a clamorous conversation that goes several places at once. This isn’t just elaborate counterpoint, but a clash of ideas in which, at times, no single one prevails. We are at the verge of a new musical modernism here, and perhaps seeing the first true example of it, for Mahler was more advanced at this time than his younger and eventually revolutionary colleague, Arnold Schoenberg. That may not have been true by the time Mahler died in 1911, but he was hardly static during this period, and Schoenberg never denied his indebtedness to Mahler. Would the younger man have influenced the older one had Mahler lived and carried him past chromaticism into dodecaphony? These are the questions that a premature death leaves undecidable, but Mahler was evolving to the end, and doubtless had more surprises left for us.

With so much going on in the Fifth, timing is everything, and anything less than a firm hand can make a mess of things. Gianandrea Noseda did not always have it in his performance with the Philadelphia Orchestra, and there were a few places where the Orchestra lurched disconcertingly. This was particularly noticeable in the first two movements, and when Noseda took the pause that is indicated after them in the score, the body language of the players looked a bit uncomfortable. Things went better after that — there was a remarkable pianissimo in the strings at the beginning of the Adagio — but discipline could not be taken for granted, and this listener sighed a bit of relief when the finish line was crossed.

A single-item repertory

Tuba concertos are so rare that even Paul Hindemith, who wrote a concerto for virtually every instrument in the orchestra, never composed one. The only one in the repertory is the short but quite fetching one composed by the octogenarian Ralph Vaughan Williams in 1954. The contemporary American composer Michael Daugherty has entered the lists with his Reflections on the Mississippi, a work written for the orchestra’s principal tuba, Carol Jantsch, in 2012, and now receiving its first performance by it. (The world premiere was with the Temple Orchestra under Luis Biava, with the dedicatee as soloist.)

The work is divided into four movements, each with a subtitle (Mist, Fury, Prayer, Steamboat). None of these titles, nor that of the work itself, adds anything to what is simply a four-movement concerto, but it is the fashion to slap extra-musical titles on pieces today, though the kind of “mist” one associates with playing the tuba is presumably not what Mr. Daugherty had in mind.

Ms. Jantsch, looking a bit overpowered by her instrument in the soloist’s spotlight, was nonetheless firmly in control of it, and the music allowed her to range from low growls to a surprisingly lyric upper range. As to the work as a whole, much of it might have passed for film music of the more elevating kind, with some business in the percussion to give it a little edge. Whether Jantsch’s virtuosic work aside it was worth 20 minutes of a Philadelphia Orchestra program is another matter.

Much of what is described as modern music stops around the Bay of Pigs, if not earlier, as far as the concert repertory goes. New works may get an initial hearing, but rarely more than that, and although many may deserve no more, the lack of works in circulation from the past half century is now a serious problem. Curatorship is part of an orchestra’s business, not just token novelty. If we treat the classical music tradition as something that more or less went out of business with Stravinsky, Shostakovich, and Britten, then we are creating a closed museum. Ask the Barnes Foundation how easy it is to attract a mass audience to a static collection, no matter its value.