The first bars of this set are so startling that you momentarily suspect that there must have been a mistake. What is Mussorgsky’s Night on the Bare Mountain doing at the start of the Second Symphony by Théodore Dubois (1837-1924)? Alas I have no explanation, and nor does the booklet, but the demonic opening motif from Bare Mountain launches Dubois’s symphony of 1912 and permeates the chromatic colouring of the first movement. Thereafter, Dubois follows a well-trodden Franco-German path, with nods to Franck and Mendelssohn and also with some Wagnerian inflation, but the symphony’s impulse is strong and the music merits the fine performance it receives from the Brussels Philharmonic under Hervé Niquet.

This is a volume in the excellent series produced by the Palazzetto Bru Zane in Venice, which devotes itself to promoting French music that enjoyed more acclaim in its day than it does now. Dubois was one of Paris’s panjandrums, a Prix de Rome winner, director of the Conservatoire, organist at La Madeleine. The works here have been selected to show the breadth of his output, from a hyper-Romantic, Schumannesque A minor Piano Sonata (1908) to various religious pieces, including a full-scale Messe pontificale which seems to take Viennese Masses, particularly Schubert’s, as a model. There is also an F minor Symphonie française, stirringly played by Les Siècles under François-Xavier Roth, and an A minor Piano Quartet over which shades of Franck and Schumann again loom. No innovator, perhaps, but Dubois is a pleasure to listen to.