Bernstein's account of this symphony on DG is so firmly controlled and has such an urgent sense of drama and destination that it never seems unduly slow while one is listening to it; even in the opening paragraph, which nearly comes to a halt in bar 10, the suspense of the approaching allegro is tangible. And yet he is slow: Plasson on EMI, without ever seeming hurried, finds no difficulty in knocking nearly two minutes off the timing of the first movement and about a minute from each of the others. Giulini actually adds over two minutes to Bernstein's overall timing (six minutes to Plasson's!), half of this to the first movement. At first one wonders how on earth he is going to manage this feat; his opening adagio is not conspicuously slow, at least not by comparison with Bernstein, and although he pauses here and there for some rather affected phrase-mouldings he arrives at the first allegro a full 40 seconds before Bernstein does. Then all is made clear: Giulini's allegro is heavy and sluggish, robbed of all sense of urgency by a great deal of rhetorical rubato. Franck, to be sure, has a number of poco rall. markings, but Giulini turns most of them into molto rall., and adds quite a few of his own. This would matter far less if there were a firm overall tempo (Bernstein, after all, is much given to lingering), but Giulini does not allow the music to reach a genuine allegro until the coda, when the sudden spurt of energy is both a shock and a profound relief.
Franck regarded the allegretto as a conflation of slow movement and scherzo, but there is not a trace of scherzo quality to this reading. Slowish to start with (so is Bernstein, but with a lightness of touch to persuade one otherwise) it slackens and puts on weight at the very first double bar. The expression is thick-featured and portentous; the music seems exhausted by its own bulk and by the effort of getting moving again after each grinding to a halt. Worse still is the ponderous and joyless finale, again slowing to a snail's pace at the beginning of the development section and without the slightest exuberance (brashness, even, would have been welcome) to the climax or the coda. Nor is the sound at all agreeable: the work is no doubt heavily scored, perhaps over-scored, but both Plasson and Bernstein demonstrate that the tuttis do not have to sound so brutally dense as they do in Giulini's hands. Bernstein is the clear winner here, but even Plasson's slightly cool and hygienic account is a wonderful antidote to Giulini's over-weight sentimentality.'