Berlioz wrote his Le Corsaire (The Pirate) Overture while on vacation in Nice in the aftermath of a failed marriage and a stressful – though successful – festival produced with Felix Mendelssohn. For Berlioz, the break was just the ticket. He soaked up the idyllic landscape and stayed “in a tower perched on a ledge of the Ponchettes rock, and feasted myself on the glorious view over the Mediterranean and tasted a peace such as I had come to value more than ever.”

The overture he wrote while in Nice – initially titled The Tower of Nice after the composer’s accommodation – is a kind of whimsical adventure fantasy, which the Sydney Symphony Orchestra dispatched with a an agile lightness and swashbuckling vigour.

British conductor Bramwell Tovey attacked the opening of the Overture with precise flicks of his baton, the SSO strings in particularly fine form – they moved as one, their melodies unspooling and the sound tinted by sustained colours from the winds. The brass section gave a bracingly energetic performance, with cleanly defined descending passages from the trombones a highlight. Tovey ran a tight ship, whipping the orchestra to a heroic climax and a daringly extended general pause in which the...