Franck Symphony in D minor – Latham-Koenig

Franck himself never heard his Symphony in D minor played well. The premiere, given by the Paris Conservatoire orchestra in 1889, was by most accounts a disaster: the players sullen and undernourished in commitment, the audience baffled by a work that dared use the English horn in a symphony. Charles Gounod, not a man given to charity toward colleagues, reportedly called it “the affirmation of impotence pushed to dogma.” History has been kinder. Posterity always is, once the composer is safely dead and cannot answer back.

So here comes another recording of a symphony that hardly wants for advocates on disc. The discography reads like a roll call of the twentieth century’s podium aristocracy. And it lands on a fledgling label with a conductor, Jan Latham-Koenig, who is respected in certain quarters — his Massenet has admirers, his stint at English National Opera left good memories — without being a marquee name. Does the world need this? Probably not. Did I enjoy hearing it anyway? Mostly, yes, with reservations that grew rather than shrank as the piece wore on.

The opening is the thing. Franck marks it Lento, and it should sound like a question asked in the dark: that rising three-note cell, D–E flat–F, groping upward out of silence, ambiguous between major and minor in a way that would have made Liszt smile with recognition. Latham-Koenig gets the atmosphere right at the very start. Hushed strings. A sense of unresolved harmonic weight. The cellos and basses breathing rather than merely playing. For a few minutes you think you’re in Giulini territory, or even Celibidache’s, that rare combination of spiritual patience and textural finish, where every strand of the orchestration is audible without being fussed over.

Then something goes slack. By the midpoint of the first movement the tempo relaxations that felt purposeful begin to feel merely slow, and the architecture — Franck’s cyclic transformations, that same thematic material returning transfigured across three linked movements rather than four, the whole symphony behaving like a single arch with the first movement alone as long as the remaining two combined — starts to sag in the middle. You lose the sense of where you are in the design. This is fatal in Franck, whose sincerity can tip into wind-baggery if a maestro doesn’t keep the line taut. Ansermet never let that happen. Neither did Boult, whose Decca-adjacent account, nominally credited to something called the “RCA Victor Symphony Orchestra,” which was in fact the Philharmonia wearing a contractual disguise (record companies used to play these games shamelessly), remains a model of unforced momentum, climaxes arriving because the music demanded them, not because the conductor decided it was time.

The allegretto, that peculiar hybrid Franck invented, part scherzo, part slow movement, with harp and plucked strings imitating a kind of ecclesiastical music box, comes off rather better here. Latham-Koenig’s ear for balance, the thing that made the opening so promising, pays dividends in textures like this. The English horn solo, uncredited in the booklet, a small annoyance, sings without simpering, which is harder to achieve than it sounds. Too many players turn this into salon music.

But the finale needs propulsion and cumulative excitement — those triumphant returns of earlier material, the chorale-like brass writing that Franck the organist clearly imagined resounding off the stone at Sainte-Clotilde — and here the performance’s earlier virtues curdle into their opposite. What was spacious becomes merely slow. What was rapt becomes literally somnolent in places. The rhetoric, when it arrives, feels underprepared, arriving from nowhere rather than earned.

I kept thinking of Karajan’s Orchestre de Paris disc, over-upholstered as it is, portentous in exactly the way French critics used to complain about German Franck. And yet it never loses tension the way this one does. Even Monteux, whom I’ve never loved in this score as much as some collectors do, keeps things moving with a Gallic clarity that never mistakes weight for depth.

The engineering is distinguished, it should be said. Avie has given its young enterprise real sonic credentials: wide dynamic range, a natural hall ambience that doesn’t over-varnish the strings. There’s nothing embarrassing here, nothing to make you wince. Latham-Koenig is a serious artist thinking seriously about a symphony that rewards seriousness. But seriousness alone won’t carry Franck home. You need nerve, too, the willingness to let the architecture breathe without letting it collapse. This interpretation breathes beautifully for twenty minutes and then, gradually, forgets to keep walking.

Worth a single hearing for the opening pages alone. Not a version to live with.