The inclusion of Berlioz’s Symphonie Funèbre et Triomphale in last night’s concert by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales must have provided gainful employment for most freelance wind and brass players in England and Wales.

Berlioz’s commemoration of the 10th anniversary of the 1830 July Revolution is scored for a huge military band with row upon row of wind and brass. There’s also a battery of percussion, not forgetting the jingling Johnny, a contraption involving bells on a stick wielded manfully here by an uncredited player who surely can’t get many opportunities to display this particular talent.

Thierry Fischer directed a suitably grandiose performance that relished both the harmonic and textural quirks.

As though suffering from a surfeit of monumentality after this admittedly overloaded piece, Fischer took a surprisingly laidback approach in Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony. Brisk tempi are one thing but a lightweight handling of the symphony’s rhetoric risks selling short the notion of heroic struggle that defines it.

This oddly counter-intuitive reading compromised the first movement in particular. The Funeral March and Scherzo were both palpably more forceful, while the finale combined the balletic with the dramatic.

The title of Michael Jarrell’s Sillages refers to the trails left behind by, say, a motorboat in the water. Jarrell deploys a trio of wind soloists (here the excellent Emmanuel Pahud, François Leleux and Paul Meyer) whose residual harmonies are picked up by the orchestra.

This expanded version of a 2005 score diffuses rarefied material over a broad canvas. Soloists and orchestra alike demonstrated impressive levels of concentration in realising an elusive conception.

On BBC Radio 3, next Monday at 2pm (www.bbc.co.uk/proms).