With or without comparisons, the Mahler First is a great calling card, and in that capacity has well served conductors from Christoph Eschenbach to Kurt Masur to Zubin Mehta. It can say much about who a conductor is or might be, and Gilbert, at 42, is a bit of a mystery man. In years past, you could have heard him conduct the Haddonfield Symphony (now Symphony in C), or spotted him as a substitute violinist in the Philadelphia Orchestra during the Riccardo Muti years, when he was a student at Curtis. But his main credits as a mature conductor have been in Stockholm and Santa Fe - he didn't exactly come roaring back to the East Coast.

During a return visit to Philadelphia, Gilbert explained his hold-back-to-move-forward approach, which exhibits solidity more than fabulousness.

"The way I explain it - and people said they thought I was absolutely insane - is that I was trying to hit a solid double," he said, regarding his candidacy period with the New York Philharmonic. "But I'm certainly going to try to hit a lot of home runs now."

Hence, Mahler First.

Unlike Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade, it makes nobody feel patronized or talked down to. And unlike the later Mahler symphonies, it leaves room for other things on the program. It's also a something-for-everybody symphony - the first movement's sunny, folksy melodies, the earthy dance rhythms of the second, the murky, mysterious klezmer of the third, and all manner of exciting fanfares in the final movement. The symphony is good orchestra hygiene: All sections get a workout.

Though Mahler doubtless designed the piece to showcase his own virtuosity as a conductor (his primary profession), the symphony is so tightly written, it's nearly conductor-proof: If everything is in the right place, success is assured. Even if rehearsals go badly for whatever reason, you won't tank.

But the piece is best when dressed for success. Much as I admire the new Chicago Symphony Orchestra recording with elder statesman Bernard Haitink, his considered pace, while establishing a clearer kinship with Mahler's later music, here becomes a more laborious journey. This piece wants to scintillate and should be allowed to.

As a cultural object, the Mahler First speaks multifariously. Eschenbach's relatively straightforward performances, both in Philadelphia and in Houston, told audiences that he was good at deploying large forces, wasn't always Mr. High-Concept Luftpausen, and, in certain settings, could be lots of fun.

The symphony was perfect for Mehta's animal energy, though he went into overtime with his New York Philharmonic so the opening violin harmonics would be the only ones on record that were perfectly in tune.

After Masur's many years of ultra-refined performances with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, his Mahler First showed New Yorkers he wasn't an old-school German oblivious to this great Jewish composer (whose music was banned during the Nazi era).

So what did Gilbert's performance last Thursday have to say?

For those who cringe at the coarse, forced string sound cultivated by current music director Lorin Maazel, the good news is that the Gilbert string sound is more tender and yielding. Yet for sheer loudness, Gilbert's Mahler was up there with Osmo Vanska's calling-card Prokofiev Romeo and Juliet, when he first brought the Minnesota Orchestra to Carnegie Hall. But neither had bombast, which is loudness without purpose or thought. Gilbert's fortissimos were molded rather than blasted.

Mahler operates in broad strokes, and the First is his least emotionally complicated symphony. But Gilbert went well beyond that. Details were everywhere; perhaps no Mahler First had had such a variety of sound - all organic to the orchestration but illustrating Gilbert's fine ear for possible orchestra blends. He also knows how to get extraneous sound out of the way so you can actually hear deep into the piece. The performance seemed to create such good will, his fall opening should be a breeze.

One always fears that conductors will get stuck in calling-card mode, like Charles Dutoit. His Montreal Symphony Orchestra years started looking redundant with repeated programs of Berlioz, Bartok, Stravinsky, Debussy, and Ravel showpieces. I know from radio broadcasts that he also conducted Messiaen, Mahler, and Schoenberg - but infrequently. Luckily, his showpieces are never stale, but when he dips into Copland's Symphony No. 3 and Sibelius' Symphony No. 1 with revelatory results, I want more. Much more.

If there was preemptive assurance from Gilbert on that front, it's what came before Mahler: an extremely well-prepared premiere of Peter Lieberson's sizable choral/orchestral work, The World in Flower. The piece was harmonically friendly and philosophically deep. Though rather too long and a bit overwritten, it still had "great occasion" written all over it, thanks to charismatic soloists such as Joyce DiDonato. Cleverly, he preceded Lieberson with a movement Mahler cut from his first symphony, titled Blumine, which means "floral." Clever man!

Some of the Philadelphia Orchestra's music-director candidates could find a lesson here. Why, for example, did Stéphane Denève recently program Mendelssohn's dowdy Symphony No. 5 ("Reformation")? In December, Yannick Nézet-Séguin returns with Franck's potentially turgid Symphony in D.

Then again, there's always the anti-calling-card approach that says, "If I can pull off something as problematic as this, think of what I can do with the Mahler First." I thought Vladimir Jurowski was exercising a death wish by programming Mahler's early, seldom-heard Das klagende Lied earlier this season. And then he had one of the great successes of the year.