There is much to admire: buoyant energy, sparkling lightness (in the Queen Mab Scherzo), mostly well-balanced textures and acceptable if not quite native French. Yet after one hearing I felt something was missing…I pinned it down to ‘intimacy’.

Tilson Thomas has long been a committed explorer of the Romantic highways. His San Francisco forces provide a typically well-prepared and fluent account of Berlioz’s score, slightly (deliberately?) on the cool side, which seems wholly in keeping with the work’s intentionally distanced take on the story. The choral singing is well-rounded, just lacking the last degree of familiarity and French fizz that European choruses can bring.