Completed in 1888, César Franck’s Symphony in D Minor was once very much a standard repertory work, though, for some inexplicable reason, it began to slip from favour a few decades ago and has become something of a rarity of late. Fabien Gabel’s performance with the BBC Symphony Orchestra marked its first Proms outing for nearly 20 years, and you couldn’t help but be struck by what a great and original work it is, with its dark intensity of orchestration and mood, its evolutionary structure derived from a handful of notes heard at the outset, and its absorption of the influences of Wagner and Brahms without ever seeming derivative.
Gabel’s interpretation can only be described as awesome, and was characterised by a powerful, sweeping nobility, the opening motto magnificently brooding, the first movement’s allegro flung out with almost reckless defiance. The central allegretto, rolling slow movement and scherzo into one, relaxed into eloquent lyricism before the finale, recapitulating everything that had gone before, blazed with triumphant conviction. The BBCSO were at their best here, and there was some terrific playing, the great cor anglais solo in the allegretto above all.
The evening opened, meanwhile, with the Overture to Édouard Lalo’s opera Le Roi d’Ys, another once popular – and indeed great – work that has inexplicably become a rarity: it was last heard at the Proms in 1935. Gabel’s interpretation was all exhilaration and refinement, with gloriously tumultuous brass, a rich warmth and depth in the strings, and yet again some notably beautiful instrumental solos – cello and clarinet this time.
The two works were separated by Brahms’s Violin Concerto, with Daniel Lozakovich, a former teenage prodigy, now 21, as soloist. His tone is sweet, warm and extraordinarily beautiful, wonderfully suited to Brahms’s long-breathed melodies and there was some ravishing high pianissimo, though elsewhere those jagged moments of assertion in the first movement could perhaps have been a bit more weighty and incisive. The first movement, taken fractionally too slowly, seemed sculpted rather than flowing, but the finale brought with it plenty of bravura excitement. Lozakovich’s encore was Nathan Milstein’s Paganiniana, done with formidable dexterity and bags of charm.
