It is 65 years since anything by Granville Bantock featured in a Prom, but this year his music is included in more programmes than Giuseppe Verdi's. The sudden interest in Bantock is even more baffling than the under-representation of Verdi in his bicentenary year; no significant anniversary is imminent, and no CDs or books have been published to encourage a reassessment of a composer who may have been hugely popular in the UK between the two world wars, but whose music has faded almost entirely from sight and who now seems more significant for what he did for musical life in Birmingham, where he was professor of music for more than a quarter of a century.

Jac van Steen and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales had the privilege of introducing the first Bantock score of the season. Sapphic Poem is a single-movement effusion for cello and a Mozartean orchestra, lasting about 15 minutes, which, despite the title, appears to have no explicit programme. Composed in 1906, it's regulation Edwardian romanticism, indebted to Brahms and Dvořák, with more than a hint of the tea room or the palm court, too. The scoring is nicely done, but the music is utterly unmemorable. The cello soloist, Raphael Wallfisch, certainly played it as though he really believed in it, though.

Two works with Falstaffian connections framed the Bantock. Van Steen had opened with a rather curious account of Elgar's Falstaff, pointing up its connections with Richard Strauss's tone poems more than is usual, and balanced that with two short pieces from Walton's Henry V film music, before launching rather unevenly into Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony. All seven of the symphonies are being played this season; there's even more Tchaikovsky than Bantock.

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