This Hallé programme began with Weber and ended with Janacek, both composers whom Mark Elder has championed consistently for many years. When he was music director at English National Opera in the 1980s, a cycle of Janacek opera was one of the (many) highlights. Since he stepped down, he has returned to the Coliseum for Weber's Der Freischütz as well as conducting Euryanthe at Glyndebourne.

In Bridgewater Hall, Elder put the Freischütz overture unmistakably into an operatic context. This was the drama of the opera distilled into a single span of highly wrought orchestral music, like a violently compressed tone poem. Yet it still found the space for its lyrical moments, and for its supernatural horrors.

Weber's horn writing asks a lot, but the Hallé quartet was always commanding, and they were equally up to the very different demands of Haydn's Symphony No 73, La Chasse, with its finale depicting a hunt in full flight. Every aspect of the performance, though, had that expert flair, energy and presence.

Most works, however, are put in the shade by Janacek's Glagolitic Mass. Elder conducted the original version of the score, unearthed only in the 1980s and now gradually supplanting the sanitised, easier-to-perform version that has been standard ever since the 1927 premiere. It's wilder, more imposing and more unpredictable than what we are used to hearing, and conveys the sense of a devotional work composed by a devout agnostic, who followed his own instincts rather than any doctrinal prescriptions.

With the Hallé and its choir, a forthright set of soloists (Stephanie Friede, Ann Taylor, Adrian Thompson and Brindley Sherratt) and Darius Battiwalla unleashing the ferocious organ solo, Elder pushed the music's envelope as far as he could. The noise should have been majestic. However, the acoustics of the Bridgewater Hall keep everything at arm's length, while adding a confusing - from where I was sitting at any rate - blur to voices and instruments.