This Hallé concert ventured into the unknown without featuring anything written later than 1913. Few in the audience could have claimed close acquaintance with The Mystic Trumpeter, a half-hour Walt Whitman setting written by one of the orchestra's former conductors, Sir Hamilton Harty. And if Elgar's Violin Concerto is as common as sliced bread, Thomas Zehetmair's interpretation isn't: the Austrian violinist absorbed it into his repertoire only recently.

Neither novelty really hit the bull's-eye. Setting Whitman was a British fashion early in the 20th century, but you have to wonder if Harty was the best man for the task. True, those opening bass moans and shivering drums could almost have been conjured by Britten. At other times the music bumps into Elgarian furniture, or leans toward the bawling Edwardian ballad - helped in Manchester by the baritone James Rutherford, no shrinking violet. Nothing settles or builds: like other self-taught composers, Harty had an instinctive ear for orchestral colour, but was wobbly on structure. It was good to hear his mystic trumpet sound, just once, in a performance full of gusto (praise be to the Hallé Choir). But now the score can be gently put back on the shelf.

Zehetmair's Elgar deserves a longer life; it's always refreshing to hear foreign perspectives on our national treasures. He began darkly, then turned febrile but tender for the all-permeating Windflower theme: these were good signs. Thereafter, he let the concerto's multilayered emotions slip a bit; the playing, always skilful, drifted into the homogenous. It's as though Zehetmair had swallowed the concerto, but wasn't yet finished digesting.

There was no novelty about the Hallé. Their form under Mark Elder is rock solid, splendiferous in ensemble and tone; I'd rather listen to them play English music than any other orchestra in the world. Their quiet rapture launching the Elgar's slow movement was heavenly; and in Vaughan Williams's Wasps overture I'd never heard such richly textured buzzing. I admit it, I was stung.

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