Elgar's First Symphony is an enigma. On one hand, it's the piece that turned Elgar into a musical heavyweight. But on the other, the music creates a world of emotional ambiguity. It was this tension between grandiosity and intimacy that Mark Elder and his magnificent Hallé Orchestra created.

Elder played the introduction to the first movement like a distant dream: the famous motto theme of the symphony was a nostalgic vision that dissolved in the torrid drama of the main, fast section of the movement. The Hallé players released a dark energy, from the churning power of the brass lines to the melancholy tread of a lonely clarinet melody. Elder galvanised the players in a startling, single-minded per formance that made Elgar's tortuous structure seem shattering and inevitable. The final moments of the movement were a desolate lament for this lost idyll.

In the central movements, Elder inspired a riot of orchestral colour from the players, revealing the clarity and finesse of Elgar's scoring in the febrile energy of the scherzo and the limpid melodic lines of the slow movement. The third movement ached with a sense of unfulfilled longing, a feeling only resolved with the massive force of the finale. But even the moment when the motto theme appeared in a blaze of brassy glory did not produce an emotionally triumphant coda. Instead, the richness of Elder's interpretation, and the total command of the Hallé's playing, created an experience that was at once more ambivalent and more powerful: the theme became a symbol, not of victory, but of acceptance. It was the climax of a thrilling interpretation, and proof of the symbiotic partnership between Elder and the Hallé musicians.