“His innermost nature is so akin to mine that he and I are like two fruits from the same tree.” So wrote Mahler in 1900, about his friend and fellow composition pupil Hans Rott, whose magnum opus, his Symphony in E Major, was the main work in Marc Minkowski’s latest concert with the BBC Symphony.

When Rott died in an asylum in 1884, at the age of 25, the symphony was unpublished and had not been performed complete. But the manuscript had been circulated, and opinions about it differed. Bruckner and Mahler were admiring, Brahms dismissive. Nothing was then heard of it until the 1980s, when the score was rediscovered. Immediately apparent was its glaring closeness, in places, to Mahler’s idiom – particularly certain passages in the Resurrection Symphony of 1894. Influence or plagiarism? I’d say the latter, but we shall probably never know.

Minkowski is the latest conductor to champion the work, and his performance was white-hot throughout. It doesn’t strike me as the outright masterpiece that some have claimed. The first movement is derivatively Wagnerian, and the finale interminable, as if Rott wasn’t sure how to end it. But the slow movement is a thing of great beauty, and the ländler-cum-waltz scherzo – the most “Mahlerian” section of the score – has tremendous whirling energy.

Minkowski prefaced the symphony with Schubert and genuine Mahler – works written, tellingly, when both composers were young. Schubert’s Fourth Symphony (written at 19) was beguiling and elegant. Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (begun at 23, the age Rott went mad) was less accomplished. Katarina Karnéus was the soloist in a stately performance, operatic rather than intimate, in which she did too little with the words, and Minkowski lingered too long over orchestral detail.