The challenge faced by all legacy artists – of recreating their youthful vigour – is particularly acute for the Who, who lost their glorious trainwreck of a drummer, Keith Moon, to an overdose in 1978, while bassist John Entwistle followed in 2002.

Surviving members Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey have tried numerous methods to fill this seismic void, fielding a full symphony orchestra for this gig – Daltrey’s idea, apparently, after the release of an orchestral reworking of the band’s epochal opera, Tommy.

The strings flesh out an opening run through Tommy’s highlights, and, if a certain primal element is missing – the lean attack of Townshend’s windmill-arm guitar often drowned out by blustering brass – the opera’s dizzying psychodramas still impress. If Tommy’s plot has never rewarded close reading, its themes of confusion and psychological abuse remain vivid.

A later suite of material from their other rock-opera, Quadrophenia, similarly triumphs via how perfectly Townshend’s songs channel that adolescent fear of betraying your ideals, and how completely Daltrey commits to the ridiculously overblown, near-operatic and sublime Love Reign O’er Me.

Elsewhere, the setlist mostly avoids their 60s anthems in favour of two new songs suggesting their forthcoming album is livelier than 2006’s muted Endless Wire, and a handful of hits and obscurities from their 70s heavy-rock era.

An acoustic Won’t Get Fooled Again – which Townshend dedicates to modern-day activists, saying he wrote it about his own generation of “hairy hippies, who achieved fuck-all” – strikes an electrifying if uneasy note, its cynicism suiting the deceitful tenor of post-referendum politics but undone somewhat by Daltrey’s own recent gammon-y pronouncements.

A closing Baba O’Reilly is an uncomplicated pleasure, however – all passion, power chords and Townshend’s poetic rendering of those lonely, anguished teenage wastelands. It’s a place he knows well, its landscape of hope, agony and betrayal the location for so many of his songs, their profundity undimmed by the passing of the years and the Who’s lamented genius rhythm section.

The enduring value of that songbook is something a visibly moved Daltrey recognises, moments before he and Townshend leave the stage. “Our glamour is gone, our youth is gone,” he grins, “but the music still sounds fucking brilliant.”