The relationship between music and dance is a theme that runs intermittently through this season's Hallé programmes. Ravel's Mother Goose and Holst's The Perfect Fool, which formed the kernel of the orchestra's concert with Martyn Brabbins, were presented in versions intended for ballet, though each had a more complex genesis and afterlife. Ravel's fairytale phantasmagoria was written for piano duet, and subsequently reworked for the stage, though we now usually hear it in an abbreviated concert version. The Perfect Fool, premiered as a ballet in 1918, was subsumed five years later into an unsuccessful opera of the same name.

The Mother Goose ballet links the various tales by a complex narrative that weaves together the work's thematic material into a post-Wagnerian synthesis. The darkest of the score's three incarnations, it became, in Brabbins's hands, a very adult work, shot through with premonitions of lost innocence and adolescent sexuality.

The operatic version of The Perfect Fool, meanwhile, was a spoof of Wagner's Parsifal, and the ballet music was redeployed in a scene where a Wizard conjures the spirits of three of the four elements of medieval cosmogony - air is missing, for some reason. The ballet was written shortly after The Planets: the Wizard's music echoes Uranus, while earth, water and fire bring overtones of Mars, Neptune and Mercury respectively. Thrilling, polyrhythmic stuff, it was given a hair-raising performance by Brabbins that left you wondering why it is played so infrequently and why so few choreographers are drawn to it.

A cool rendition of Debussy's Danse Sacrée et Danse Profane preceded the Ravel, while the concert opened with Elgar's Introduction and Allegro and closed with his In the South. Brabbins's approach to Elgar was unsentimental, pulling both works away from English nostalgia and anchoring them in the European mainstream, which is where they belong.