Precisely what Cesar Franck meant by the lento and allegro moderato that alternate in the first movement of the Symphony will remain for ever a mystery, since he attached no metronome marks to them, but you tinker with that tempo relationship at your peril. Lopez-Cobos, very sensibly, avoids the hazard of melodramatically maximizing their contrast. His lento is perceptibly slow, but with a firm sense of forward movement and an unexaggerated use of rubato, and his allegro is moderato but indubitably allegro: powerful, but neither aggressive nor too hasty for its weight. He is in expert control, too, of dynamic light and shade, and is particularly successful at clarifying Franck's orchestral palette: there is no risk at all, in his hands, that the textures will ever seem clogged or that quiet woodwind details will be obscured. Franck himself expressed some dissatisfaction with his own wind-writing in the Symphony, but in this exceptionally clean and lucid account there seems no reason at all to agree with him.
And then, at a crucial moment (the point which in a normal symphony would be called the 'recapitulation', where Franck brings back his opening lento theme for the last time before the coda, but now in the 'wrong' key, and in canon) Lopez-Cobos to my mind miscalculates seriously. His lento is now much faster, reducing the clinching power of that theme's return and, worse still, making the ensuing allegro, at its original speed, seem stolid by comparison. Why does he do it? To increase the drama of that moment, perhaps, but it damages the music's architectural grandeur quite seriously.
There are quite a lot of compensations, among them a real urgency to the slow movement's second idea (itself a compensation, perhaps, for the almost excessively seamless smoothness of the main theme) and an extremely interesting way with the big tune in the finale, with touches of portamento that may well be 'authentic' and are certainly effective. But with Lopez-Cobos's imagination and care for detail goes a certain lack of passionate eloquence: you will have to turn to Karajan (EMI) to discover that there is disquiet and even danger in that first movement or that the finale is a joyous affirmation, whether of faith, as Karajan seems to imply, or of a sheer but more secular joie de vivre (Monteux on RCA). Flor (also RCA) offers what you might call a view of Franck from Bruckner's side of the Alps, and has in consequence a compelling control over the structure of that first movement. I would be happier with any of these (marginally happiest with Monteux) than with Lopez-Cobos, but his Le chasseur maudit is splendidly sonorous and dramatic, and his reading of the Symphony, if it must severely be accounted a failure, is a very interesting one. For all my reservations I enjoyed hearing it.'