Last-minute substitutions to programmes and soloists rarely produce revelatory performances. But this occasion was an exception; Thomas Hampson's indisposition meant that the young German soprano Anne Schwanewilms came to sing Strauss's Four Last Songs. From her first few bars it was clear that Schwanewilms is something out of the ordinary, and not merely in terms of her effortlessly virtuosic vocal technique. Her unfailing instinct for the finest details of phrasing and timing lifted this performance into stratospheric reaches of musical experience. Although there are many sopranos who sing these songs beautifully, with Schwanewilms every word really counts in a way that communicates with breathtaking intensity. Most vitally of all, the Hallé caught every one of her shades and nuances with a sensitivity that many conductors - let alone soloists - can only dream of.

Knowing how the young Webern idolised Mahler's music, it is astonishing to hear just how Straussian his early orchestral piece Im Sommerwind is. Few of those striding horn themes and confident surges found a place in his mature work, though in other respects it is a repository of precisely the kind of visionary, ecstatic tone that suffuses the most delicate of his later minatures.

Delius's A Song of Summer is by comparison less successful, perhaps in part because it was pasted together by the composer with the help of his amanuensis Eric Fenby, who simply strung together the best bits that remained of an earlier, abandoned work.

Elder and the Hallé estowed the tenderest care upon its gentle, shimmering textures, but it never felt like any more than a pleasant filler item. So it was good to hear them getting their teeth into Dvorak's New World Symphony. In keeping with Elder's characteristically brisk tempi, the Largo was flowing rather than languid, but Tom Davey's lovely cor anglais solo captured perfectly the stillness at its heart.