The lorry left northern Spain on Saturday night following a concert in Oviedo only to be stopped the following day on the national 10 road between Bordeaux and Limoges.

“The police blocked all of the lorries without giving any information,” head of artistic production and orchestra operations Geoffroy Guirao told Delano on Thursday morning, adding: “Trucks were blocked for 15 kilometres.”

The “gilets jaunes” or yellow vests, as they are named after the high-vis vests worn by participants in the mass protest, took to the French highways last Saturday to demonstrate against fuel taxes. Some 287,000 people blocked traffic around the country.

Guirao said the Philharmonie driver had the foresight to refuel in Spain, which enabled him to maintain the truck's air conditioning and keep the precious cargo of musical instruments at the correct temperature. He said that no water or supplies were provided by authorities to the stranded drivers during the endless wait.

With an important rehearsal scheduled for Wednesday morning, the orchestra support team realised the instruments would not arrive in time and triggered plan B. They worked with the Luxembourg City Conservatoire and other partners to find the instruments needed for the orchestra, even shipping a French bassoon in from France.

The blockade on trucks was eventually lifted by police on Wednesday morning and the instruments arrived safely in Luxembourg at around 11pm the same day.

Similar protests were seen in Belgium this week prompting fuel shortages at some petrol stations in Wallonia. Energy and environment advisor at industry federation Fedil Jean-Marc Zahlen told Delano on Wednesday that the situation in Luxembourg was becoming “slightly tense”, but at that time he had received no reports of major issues regarding fuel supply or shortages. “I read that there has been one or the other service station where a product wasn’t available for a few hours,” he said, adding: “Such temporary shortages for a product can be due to other factors or issues in the supply chain for a specific brand. The yellow jacket blockades certainly don’t help in such a situation.”