Paul Wittgenstein, the pianist who lost his right arm in the first world war, was not a man to mince his words. Though he commissioned several left-handed works from Europe's finest composers, he didn't necessarily like, or agree to play, the results. Prokofiev and Ravel's concertos initially received short shrift, although Wittgenstein did eventually perform Ravel's - subject to making a few of his own improvements.

It's hard to imagine now why he was disappointed by Ravel's left hand concerto. Not surprisingly, it isn't dramatically virtuosic, but then neither is its G major counterpart which he wrote at exactly the same time; in fact, their cadenzas feature the same rippling textures and warmly spacious melodies. Yet though jazzy rhythms and harmonies infuse both, there is a distinctive Spanish influence behind the superficially jazzy inflections of the left hand concerto, whose glittering scherzo also features the most irresistibly manic version of the ubiquitous Dies Irae theme ever written. Pascal Roge's velvety, sonorous tone was beautifully complemented by incisive yet luxuriant support from Lu Jia and the Halle. His encore - Satie's delicate E minor Gnossienne - was translucently lovely.

Control of complex orchestral textures is one of Jia's great strengths, as he demonstrated with the Halle last year. And Romantic frescoes don't come much weightier than Strauss's vast Alpensinfonie, the last of his great tone-poems and by far the hardest to pace. The suspicion that it doesn't quite justify its length is partly down to the material itself, which feels thin by comparison with its predecessors. As Strauss acknowledged, even the radiant horn theme that binds it together is pinched from Bruch's violin concerto. But when a performance is as lovingly coloured as this one, resistance to its hyperbole recedes in the face of sheer beauty of sound.