Any concert which pairs the serene austerity of Bach's Art of Fugue with the blowsy decadence of Offenbach's Parisian suite has to be either a little unhinged, or something to do with Shostakovich. The Russian famously stated that he loved all music, "from Bach to Offenbach", and this central programme in Manchester's centenary celebrations took him at his word.

Mark Elder and the Halle applied equal diligence to both counterpoint and Can can, then demonstrated how aspects of both infused Shostakovich's first two symphonies, a pair of works diametrically opposed in atmosphere, aspiration and popularity.

Under normal circumstances, one might think of the First Symphony, written when the composer was still a teenage conservatory student, as juvenilia were it not for the fact that Shostakovich seems to grow into a fully formed mature artist halfway through. The first two movements are all cheeky animation, yet then it slows down and becomes bitterly sardonic, plumbing depths of profundity well in advance of the composer's years. The Halle gave the British premiere in the 1931-2 season, and still play as if they own the piece.

If the First Symphony is peculiar, the far less well-known Second is perverse. Commissioned to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the October revolution, the piece stretches the compass of the term "symphony" to breaking point; it is a lop-sided, single-movement work that begins with a sequence of pseudo-fugues and includes a factory siren amongst its scoring elements.

At the heart of it all is a musical depiction of an incident Shostakovich witnessed on a St Petersburg street, in which a crowd killed a boy accused of stealing an apple. Elder sculpted this passage exquisitely, building into a menacing explosion of violence, which Elder directed with some totalitarian fist-in-the-air gestures. I don't believe that I have ever been so comprehensively bullied by a symphony orchestra before.