Some concerts included Ottoman-themed whirling dervishes. A collaboration with the contemporary circus company Circa included a trapeze. One of his recordings of Vivaldi, featuring the German countertenor Andreas Scholl, featured in the James Bond movie Spectre.

From the beginning, Dyer’s mission has been to “loosen the stays” of 16th, 17th and 18th Century music, and Notre-Dame proves to be every bit as liberating.

‘I want people to feel like they’ve got on a plane and have gone to Paris for the evening’

Paul Dyer

Valentine’s libretto is performed by actors Matilda Ridgway, best known on TV for Bump, and Glenn Hazeldine, of Colin from Accounts and Redfern Now fame. The pair tells the story of a Sydney engineer who arrives to work at the cathedral on the day it becomes engulfed in fire.

The music performed by both orchestra and choir ranges from the haunting O virga ac diadema by Hildegard von Bingen to the Australian premiere of the Introit from 18th-century French composer André Campra’s requiem.

A 90-minute video is also projected onto screens the shape of the cathedral’s stained-glass windows, depicting historical scenes.

Dyer was in his early 20s and a harpsichord student at Paris’s Cite internationale des arts when he was first “overwhelmed with the beauty” of the cathedral on the Ile de la Cite.

He hopes the performance will convey the same intoxication he felt as a young man, falling under the spell of the Marais district, savouring the perfume, the colours and the style of the streets in the lee of the mighty Notre-Dame.

“I want people to feel like they’ve got on a plane and have gone to Paris for the evening,” he says. “If they’ve been introduced to some of the world’s most beautiful music along the way, I’ll be happy, man.”

Notre-Dame, February 27 to March 2, City Recital Hall, Sydney.