‘Gloriously gut-punching’ was a San Francisco critic’s verdict on the live performance of Ives’s Fourth Symphony used for this disc. He was of course referring primarily to the riotous second movement, Comedy: Allegretto, which is both extravagantly elaborate and tremendously exhilarating. Only those alienated by its gleeful forcefulness could possibly hear it as chaotic, and this performance gains greatly from Michael Tilson Thomas’s clear-headed control over every expressive aspect of the work: not just the razzamatazz but the almost comic sobriety of the fugal third movement and, most tellingly of all, the high-minded eloquence of the finale as it slowly dissolves into silence. This is an exceptionally well-crafted reading of a notoriously complex score, and exceptionally well recorded, with the welter of competing instrumental lines – even a theremin can be heard at one point – always given sufficient space to make their contributions register. Peter Dugan gives the boldly delineated solo piano part maximum weight and the brief choral contributions are raptly evocative.

Ives himself thought particularly highly of the visionary finale, and the whole work tends to blow away anything and everything it gets paired with – even the Third Symphony. It does so again on this disc; the most recent coupling before this one, from the Seattle Symphony under Ludovic Morlot (4/16), included a fine version of the Fourth that left the relatively sober Third seeming almost lame: few conductors since Bernstein have been able to puzzle out its special emotional temperature. Tilson Thomas shapes the long, effusive lines effectively in a recording that gives a natural perspective to richly sonorous textures. But even he can’t completely banish a feeling that the music teeters on the verge of aimlessness here and there. With no sudden outbursts of brass band mayhem, an aura of straitlaced piety can become all too real.

You can’t accuse the San Francisco Symphony Chorus of being overly genteel in the short groups of hymns that precede each of the symphonies. But it’s difficult to imagine anything less authentically Ivesian that these polished, professionally sung renditions, with their discreet organ accompaniments. Maybe some recordings of actual church congregations, with a mix of singing on and off the note, as well as the odd wrong note from the organist, might have been better. Nevertheless, if you skip the hymns and just take in the two symphonies, the full gamut of Ives’s uncompromisingly innovative exploration of how a wide range of popular and functional musics, not just hymns, could bring a distinctively new, experimental character to mainstream orchestral genres is as satisfying as ever.