To have on a single disc Berlioz’s four attempts at the Prix de Rome, or at least as much of them as survives, is one of the most enjoyable fruits of this bicentenary year. Together they present a vivid portrait of the composer in his twenties, a Janus figure looking at once back to Gluck and forward to the more highly coloured, Romantic products of the mid-19th century. These four works are all the more extraordinary for being based on a format devised by someone else – something Berlioz preferred to avoid after Benvenuto Cellini; even here he couldn’t resist adding at times to the texts provided.

He tried to destroy La mort de Sardanapale, his prize-winning cantata of 1830, and only the end of it has survived by accident. Like its predecessors, it deals with an extreme situation. To that extent they all chimed in with Berlioz’s natural propensities for shaking and stirring audiences, even to the point of aural discomfort. It’s fascinating to find so many features of the mature Berlioz already in place (as indeed they are in the recently discovered Messe solennelle of 1824): the ubiquitous diminished sevenths, the hitching up of tonalities by semitones, the love of descending scales (as here in the wonderful line for Cléopâtre’s ‘Il n’en est plus pour moi que l’éternelle nuit’, which could be Dido in Les troyens some 30 years later). The poetic Berlioz is also in evidence, notably in the beautiful Nature-music that opens La mort d’Orphée, his earliest attempt from 1827.

The contribution of the solo singers on this disc belongs more to the 19th century than to the 18th, which is possibly what Berlioz would have wanted. That’s to say, all three voices are dramatic in size and style. There’s some spreading at the top of all three above mezzo forte, but in giving their all they are merely taking a cue from Berlioz’s orchestra which, under Casadesus’s firm direction, miraculously already sounds like the Berlioz we know. In softer passages all three are excellent. Perhaps one of the most astonishing things about this astonishing music, for anyone who knows anything about French officialdom, is not that it should have taken Berlioz four attempts to win the prize but that he should ever have won it at all! Nearly two centuries later, it’s still shaking and stirring.