For a music lover, there is a once-in-a-lifetime moment one hopes to experience – that visceral, transcendent moment when you hear a work performed like you’ve never heard it played before.

It makes you listen more intently than you thought you knew how; it gets under your skin; it grabs you by the heart and lifts you up, carrying you off to another plane.

Raphaël Pichon, Thibaut Roussel and Ensemble Pygmalion. Photo © Claudio Raschella

For me, that moment came while attending a performance of Tannhäuser at the Deutsche Oper Berlin in 2010. At the time, I laughingly described how I had to peel my scalp off the back wall of the auditorium afterwards.

It was a moment I have cherished ever since and never dared hope to experience again.

Dumbfounded as I am, however, I am thrilled to report that the long-awaited Australian debut of French choir and orchestra Pygmalion, under founding Director Raphaël Pichon, has had the same effect.

Pichon and his ensemble don’t just take apart and reassemble Baroque masterworks to resonate like the popular vernacular of today, they also reconfigure the listener for good and, in this case, for the better.

We’ve long known about the...