Be honest: when was the last time you smiled your way through Brahms’s Fourth Symphony? Well, it just could have been on Sunday, if you’d been at the Festival Hall to watch a big man gleefully hit a tiny triangle, and hear a body of natural horns bring bucolic exuberance to the third movement.

This was John Eliot Gardiner’s Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique — and it was a performance I shall remember. The entire body of strings stood throughout the symphony. As it began, their bodies danced like a wave of the sea. Phrases bounced and ricocheted from woodwind to strings and back to brass. Syncopations sliced through the air like whetted knives. And rich and strange songs were heard at the music’s heart.

This performance could well have stolen the thunder from the first half of the evening, in which the Monteverdi Choir continued its two-year celebration of Brahms. But suddenly it all made sense. The dramatic antiphonal choral works by Gabrieli, Lassus and Schütz we’d heard had reached their apotheosis in the symphonic voices of the orchestra.

The selection of sacred motets and psalms in the first half were selected from Brahms’s own trailblazing concert programmes in Vienna. Now they were all but semi-staged, as the Monteverdi Choir grouped and regrouped, exploiting every acoustic trick.

Brahms’s own Geistliches Lied and Fest und Gedenksprüche framed music that had audibly influenced him — most obviously the Bach Cantata (BWV 150) that inspired the symphony’s finale. Then Gabrieli’s Sanctus and Benedictus rang out in the voices of three groups of singers and instrumentalists.

A double arc of unaccompanied bright young voices had a spring in their step for Eccard’s Übers Gebirg Maria geht. And, best of all, three groups of singers and two fiddlers recreated Schutz’s dramatisation of Saul’s vision on the road to Damascus. A truly epiphanic evening, from start to finish.

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