Knocking at the Hellgate is a better title than Suite from Bliss, which is what most composers might have called it. Bliss was Brett Dean’s first opera, staged to acclaim in 2010 in Sydney and Edinburgh. It is based on the Peter Carey novel: Harry, an advertising salesman, has a near-death experience after which he has the revelation that his old life was literally hell, and that he urgently needs to escape to a new one.

Dean’s new suite sweeps us straight in with panicky, tumultuous music that makes Harry’s heart attack real and terrifying. Then the orchestra recedes behind samples from TV ads and gameshows, single lines (“Come on down!”) emerging through the white noise. At one point, one of the viola players puts on a pink feather boa and gets up to spin a roulette wheel. The sound world Dean creates is effective, but this passage lasts too long. At last Harry himself sings – but these snippets, with Amanda Holden’s succinct words delivered persuasively here by baritone Russell Braun, don’t sketch much of a narrative. Does music as theatrical as this stand alone without its story? Perhaps this suite functions better as a trailer for Bliss than as a work independent of it, whatever its title.

In any case, conductor Sakari Oramo and the BBCSO performed it with complete conviction. And, after the interval, former Berlin Philharmonic viola player Dean was among them in the orchestra for Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben, a bold, brightly coloured performance featuring a heroic solo from violinist Friederike Starkloff.