In one of Berlioz’s main revisions to the structure of his source, William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, it is Friar Laurence rather than the prince, who ends the symphony by delivering a scathing rebuke to the Montagues and the Capulets. For this performance David Soar stalked to the middle of stage dressed in a dark suit broken by a scarlet pocket square, recalling the blood spilt by the eponymous young lovers, and delivered this final solo with a sense of disdain and moral certainty would have compelled the most absent-minded audience member to feel a pang of complicity in the tragedy that had just unfolded. Soar’s highly theatrical delivery was typical of a performance that persistently imbued Berlioz’s music with a sense of the dramatic moment.

Another delightful moment of theatricality occurred at the beginning of part three: the love scene. As Romeo prepares to surprise Juliet at her balcony, the gay voices of the departing revellers can be heard floating across the garden wall. To achieve the effect of these voice slowly drifting away, the choir was relocated between parts two and three to the back of the Barbican hall. Anyone sitting below in the stalls, unable to see the choir above and behind them, was surprised by an ethereal and fragile bricolage of voices and laughs seemingly seeping from the very walls of amphitheatre; slowly engulfing the auditorium before melting back out into the London sky.

Or course, Berlioz’s Romeo and Juliet gives a composer ample opportunity to engage with a range of dramatic qualities; an opportunity that Sir Andrew Davis took full grasp of. From the opening ponderous and playful sweeps of flutes that signalled the first nervous meeting of the lovers; to the shrill and piercing violins that indicated Juliet’s suicide and the confirmation of the tragic resolution, the progress of the lovers was presented with an energy and preciseness of expression that gave the symphony a clear shape with a wide spectrum of emotional shading that would have left both music and theatre lovers satisfied in equal measure.