Does the Elgar comes across in its full, carnivorous, grandeur? It’s pretty good, but does it at times seem a touch muffled? The Barbican was always notorious for its “dry” acoustic - basically, you didn’t get the full bass response out of the room and the reverb time was too short - but now you are supposed to get the full sound spectrum. Sitting bang slap in the middle of the stalls, I don’t think I missed much, but maybe I could have done with a touch more clarity at stormy moments - of which there are many, in the Elgar. And anyway, the sheer volume produced by such a full orchestra - massed ranks of strings, full percussion and brass sections in addition to the mandatory woodwind, and even two slightly overwhelmed harps - could surely blast away the acoustic deficiencies of any hall on earth.

Perhaps a truer test was the first half of the show, when the delicate, fluttering Mitsuko Uchida gave us Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21 in C. Sir Colin and the LSO scarcely broke into a sweat, the whole piece was kept nicely understated, and the sound balance (a purely ‘natural’ acoustic, since there is no electronic assistance here) seemed excellent.

I’m no music critic but I have been in that hall previously when its drawbacks were very apparent. Straining to hear Les Arts Florissants - a chamber orchestra/opera company, playing mostly original instruments - project Purcell and Charpentier into the void was a sometimes frustrating experience. You could almost see the sound disappearing upwards before it reached you (then, I was towards the front of the circle). For me to do a full and fair comparison, I’d have to experience that outfit doing a repeat performance. And I see they are indeed coming back, but are scheduled to play in the Barbican complex’s theatre rather than the concert hall. Which brings us on to the wider question of the Barbican, what it is, and how it is used and perceived.