John Casken's Apollinaire's Bird is at once an oboe concerto and a meditation on the sad brutality of war. Written for Stéphane Rancourt, who gave its world premiere with the Hallé under Mark Elder, it draws its inspiration from Guillaume Apollinaire's poem Un Oiseau Chante, written during the first world war. It describes the birdsong heard above the din of combat and captures those memories of happier times that the song evokes in the minds of the soldiers mired in the trenches below.

Beautifully crafted, it's a rich, emotionally complex work. The bird's cry is first heard on the oboe over a muted, unnerving orchestral depiction of battle, comprising penumbral brass throbs, clanking metal and percussive gunfire. As the piece progresses, the oboe's song becomes the thematic basis of both an exquisite slow section and a graceful scherzo as nostalgic memories begin to tug. But we are never allowed to forget the surrounding conflict for long. Seven orchestral eruptions drown out the bird's song, though its resumption towards the close offers hope of renewal beyond despair. The beauty of Rancourt's playing belied the difficulty of the solo writing. Orchestrally it was faultless.

Its companion pieces were two cabaret-based, leftwing works from the 1930s: the music hall scene from Shostakovich's ballet The Golden Age, and Brecht and Weill's opera The Seven Deadly Sins. The Shostakovich, with its tap-dancing capitalists and strutting fascists, was a tour de force that brought the house down. Weill's bitter exposé of the human cost of monetarism came in a staging by Caroline Clegg that became too brutal too soon. Jessie Buckley was excellent as icy Anna I, making life hell for impulsive sister Anna II (Anna Cooper). Grant Doyle and Sam Furness were among the appalling family that eggs her on.