Hector Berlioz, whose father named him for the Trojan hero savagely slain by the Greek Achilles, fell in love with Virgil’s epic Aeneid while still a child. “I have spent my life in the company of these demi-gods,” he told a patroness. “I know them so well that I imagine they know me.” His sprawling masterpiece Les Troyens (The Trojans) posed challenges that went unmet until well into the 20th century. Indeed, it was only in 2003, for the 200th anniversary of the composer’s birth, that Paris was to hear the score in its entirety. The conductor on that historic occasion was John Eliot Gardiner. Now 80, Gardiner organized a summer 2023 tour of Les Troyens-in-concert at a slate of Europe’s most prestigious music temples. But on Night 1 of the odyssey, at the Festival Berlioz in the composer’s remote, tiny birthplace La Côte Saint-André, the maestro threw a fit, slapping a member of the cast and punching him in the face. In a prompt apology, he pleaded the extreme heat and a recent change of meds. His replacement the next evening in La Côte Saint-André was Dinis Sousa, principal conductor of the Royal Northern Sinfonia, a British chamber orchestra, who has also taken over the remaining performances in Salzburg, Berlin, Versailles, and the Proms in London. The charismatic Michael Spyres appears as the Trojan leader Aeneas. Alice Coote assays Cassandra, prophetess of doom, and Paula Murrihy is the tragic Queen Dido of Carthage. —Matthew Gurewitsch

Touring from France, to Austria, to Germany, again to France, and finally to London