Tchaikovsky initially feared his Fifth Symphony harboured something “superfluous, patchy, and insincere,” yet Philip Hale rightly heard a score that “awakens in the breast the haunting, unanswerable questions of life and death.” At Frankfurt’s wood-panelled hr-Sendesaal, Roderick Cox vindicates the composer’s later Hamburg pride. Where Evgeny Mravinsky drives the opening E-minor clarinet motto with steely Leningrad ferocity and Manfred Honeck favours interventionist rubato, Cox shapes the low woodwind tread and restless Allegro con anima with what Bachtrack’s Irma Foletti termed his “lyrisme d’un grand souffle,” refusing to oversaturate the brass. In the Andante cantabile, captured in warm broadcast sound, the solo horn spins a luminous D-major cantilena (15:30) before solo oboe and clarinet answer across clear acoustic screens and the fate motif crashes back in. After a fleet-footed Valse, Cox transforms the motto into blazing E major for the Finale as he propels the Frankfurt strings past the false pause into a noble Moderato assai brass apotheosis (46:24).