“The most telling juxtapositions – tantamount to mixed messages– came in Mozart’s Idomeneo ballet music and Shostakovich’s Ninth Symphony. In the Mozart, Gabel struck a clear balance between playful, grandiose and elegant, swinging wildly through the assorted stylistic volte-faces that make up this strange but irresistible music. This was especially effective in the central Passepied, with tilting light and shade as its tonality shifted between major and minor.
But it was in the Shostakovich that the moods being conveyed became not merely contrasting but opposite. Very deliberately, Gabel adopted a polarised approach on the podium. One pole was militaristic precision, forcing everything, despite its ostensible froth and frivolity, into a tight metric grid. This made the more rambunctious material either ridiculous, akin to circus music, or grotesque, the players becoming puppets on strings forced to dance. This became a deliriously powerful danse macabre at the end, Gabel taking it absurdly fast. The other pole was all shadows and nuance, occupying a kind of space between worlds, outside time. Here was a refuge where doleful laments were allowed to speak, and where Shostakovich’s terrible truths could finally be heard.”
-Simon Cummings, for Bachtrack