No one listening here to the start of the first movement of Franck's Sonata could guess that the marking is Allegretto ben moderato, because it's so long-drawn-out. Maisky and Argerich are not alone in taking a leisurely view of this overall tempo, but the difference between them and du Pre and Barenboim (EMI) is not so much one of total length in this movement but in the way the present artists pull the music around in a wildly varying tempo. I find it too fevered by half, but it is effective in its own terms and the instrumental mastery of both artists is beyond question. There's plenty more of the same, and Argerich even manages to insert a dubious kind of rubato into the first theme of the Allegro which presumably should then be echoed, but isn't, when the cellist enters with the same tune at bar 14. It's as if Argerich just can't rein in her wilder impulses, and of course they yield dividends of excitement. However, I detest the unmarked attacca which she makes after the Allegro—her last chord doesn't even die away before she begins the slow movement. She and Maisky—and somehow putting it this way round comes naturally—lack the gift to be simple and the first page of the finale with its famous dolce cantabile canonic theme is once again disfigured by rubato, about the last thing that is appropriate in canon. I find the playing of this movement intolerably mannered as well as hurried—over a minute shorter than with du Pre and Barenboim.
Go for this issue maybe if you like thrills above all (it's well recorded and any harsh piano tone comes from the pianist), but for contemplative quality and noble grandeur choose du Pre and Barenboim. They are well recorded if with a tolerable touch of tape hiss, and though du Pre's tone is brusque in the Allegro it is eloquently beautiful elsewhere. Both cellists have the ability to make the Sonata sound as if it were written for their instrument instead of the violin. I'm afraid that while Maisky and Argerich are adequate in Debussy's La plus que lente (the less said about Minstrels the better), they rather manhandle the tender flesh of his Sonata: although there are some beautiful things here, notably the end of the first movement, so often elsewhere hysteria seems too close around the next corner. Rostropovich and Britten (Decca) seem more relaxed but give us more emotional depth, indeed wring our hearts, in this wonderful music.'