As a conductor, instrumentalist and composer of equal note, it’s useful to be reminded that that the Hallé’s recently appointed principal guest conductor, Ryan Wigglesworth, only possesses one pair of hands. Happily, he was able to enlist those of the featured soloist, Marc-Andre Hamelin, for an informal run-through of Stravinsky’s Sonata for Two Pianos offered as a pre-concert event. It was sublime – the sound of two friends gleefully unpicking a piece that toys with the expectations of 18th-century sonata form, purely for fun.

The main event featured the UK premiere of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Piano Concerto, which Hamelin has performed in Rotterdam and Philadelphia, but has taken a couple of years to perform at home. It was worth waiting for: the 20-minute piece opens with an effervescent opening theme that expands like bubbles rising to the surface, then jostles for supremacy with sudden interventions of Latin jazz. The slow central music is a limpid and deeply personal elegy to the composer’s mentor Hans Werner Henze, and contains some of the most unaffectedly beautiful music Turnage has written, the piano’s lullaby merging with the soft chimes of temple bells. The frenetic final movement doesn’t feature a cadenza so much as a barrelhouse breakdown: not all concert pianists can boogie with any great conviction, though Hamelin took it all in his stride.

The remainder of the programme demonstrated both the overwhelming might, and the Achilles heel, of a modern symphony orchestra. A full bore performance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring showed the Hallé at its most visceral and pugilistic; yet a gravid account of Mozart’s Haffner symphony sounded rather as if the period instrument movement had never happened. Not that there’s anything wrong with large symphony orchestras interpreting this repertoire: stately tempos, lush vibrato and expanded brass has become a form of historically inspired performance in its own right.