The joy of Franck’s Symphony in D Minor: BBCSO/Gabel, at the Proms, reviewed

In the Rodgers and Hart musical On Your Toes, a Broadway hoofer is forced to work at a community college, teaching classical music like some kind of square. He picks out a melody on the piano: ‘Whom was this written by?’ ‘By Caesar Frank!’ chorus the students. ‘Pronounce it Fronk,’ he corrects them; and the audience, presumably, laughed in recognition. This was 1936, and César Franck’s Symphony in D minor was a hugely popular concert hall warhorse. Now: not so much. According to the stats in the programme book for this BBC Prom, it was performed 36 times in 50 years at the Proms, before falling off a cliff in 1959. This performance by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Fabien Gabel was only its seventh Proms outing in as many decades.

So come on then, you who rail against the unchanging canon of western classical music: explain that. It can’t have been the patriarchy this time. Personally, I’m grateful for any opportunity to hear the Symphony played live. Decades ago in the Merseyside Youth Orchestra, I played it 12 times in 14 days, and any music that can stand up to that kind of punishment clearly possesses something enduring. The handful of us who still get Franck’s Symphony really, really get it: it’s become a cult piece, and Gabel, who has guest-conducted several UK orchestras over the past few seasons, appears to be a fellow-devotee. More significantly, orchestral musicians speak highly of him: never an absolute guarantee of musical quality but a fairly reliable indicator that a conductor is – at the very least – worth investigating.

Gabel opened with another Gallic rarity – Lalo’s foamy overture to Le roi d’Ys – and Brahms’s Violin Concerto, preened and manicured into near-stasis by the soloist Daniel Lozakovich.