What gives? Maybe Mahler’s symphonies — music of extremes, from sublime tenderness to bitter anguish, from childlike evocations of country dancing to harrowing trips into darkness — are proving just a tad over the top. And, with conductors everywhere leading these scores so well, it’s hard for a performance to stand out.

Enter Bruckner. For all the lofty qualities of his searching symphonies, in a good performance the music comes across as speaking in a modest voice, and at a more deliberate pace; there is a spaciousness even in the faster movements of these works. A contemporary of Brahms, Bruckner had a visionary streak, as he attempted to reconcile the Romantic stirrings of his time with a respect for the protocols of classical form, while glimpsing the spiritual realms of the future. Still, these symphonies are sprawling; it’s difficult to make them not seem long-winded, aimless and even, as some feel, aloof.

Conductors seem increasingly up to the challenge. At Carnegie in 2017, Daniel Barenboim led the Staatskapelle Berlin in what was announced as the first complete survey in America of Bruckner’s nine symphonies. Mr. Nézet-Séguin, long a Bruckner devotee, has actually had less of a profile in Mahler. He recently completed a 10-year project to record a Bruckner cycle with his Montreal orchestra. And in June, he led the Met Orchestra in its first performance of a Bruckner symphony: the Seventh.

By choosing Bruckner’s Fourth for Friday’s program, the second in his Perspectives series at Carnegie, he seemed intent on making a strong artistic statement while also showing off this vibrant, youthful orchestra from his hometown.

He began with another Austrian composer, Mozart, offering excerpts from the opera “La Clemenza di Tito” — including two arias featuring the mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, whose appearance was part her own Perspectives series . She gave radiant, dramatically nuanced and eloquent performances of Sesto’s “Parto, parto, ma tu ben mio” and Vitellia’s “Non più di fiori” (adding “Voi che sapete” from “Le Nozze di Figaro” as an encore).