Maverick conductor François-Xavier Roth is known for his quirkily effective programming. His most recent concert with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment placed music by Berlioz and Beethoven alongside a work rarely heard of, let alone heard: the First Symphony by Georges (or George) Onslow. The French-born, Paris-based son of a disgraced British MP, Onslow was once nicknamed “the French Beethoven” on account of his supposedly overt debt to the latter’s music, which was becoming increasingly fashionable in France in the 1820s.

First performed in 1830, Onslow’s symphony is an odd if fascinating stylistic hybrid of a piece, too dependent on its influences to be truly original. There are, it is true, plenty of passages – particularly in the Adagio, and the minuet-cum-waltz that forms the scherzo – that peer back through Beethoven to Haydn. But the moments of severe hauteur near the start, and the contours of some of the thematic material, have more in common with the French classical tradition embodied in the works of Cherubini, Spontini and Gluck. You couldn’t fault Roth’s conducting, though he didn’t fully make the case for the piece. The finest section is the delightfully scampering finale, which the OAE played with relish and wonderful precision.

Berlioz, meanwhile, was represented by the Overture to Béatrice et Bénédict; Beethoven by his Third Symphony, the Eroica. The slow sections of both works curiously lacked intensity at times: the long passage drawn from Béatrice’s great act-two aria in Berlioz’s opera could have been more introverted; the Eroica’s Funeral March took a while to gain momentum. But the overture’s quicksilver allegro was done with superb grace and clarity, while the symphony’s outer movements were lean, tense and tremendously exciting – Roth at his finest.