"Organic" is a word that regularly crops up in discussion of Sibelius. Applied to his music, it conveys the idea that each work is effectively a force of nature that develops and evolves in its own unique way. In performance, we have come to value seamlessness above all other criteria, irrespective of whether our emotional expectations are satisfied.

Yet the final concert of Mark Elder's Sibelius retrospective occasionally left me wondering whether we have allowed ourselves to be limited by such a view. The Hallé have given the British premieres of many of Sibelius's works, and their sound still captures his quintessential mix of frost and fire better than any other UK orchestra. Elder is often marvellously attuned to the inner processes of the music. The Seventh Symphony, nostalgic and warm-sounding rather than craggily magisterial, ebbed and flowed as a single span. The primal rustlings and surges of Luonnotar - Hillevi Martinpelto was the occasionally wayward soloist - really did, for once, suggest that we were present at some strange yet monstrous cosmic birth.

Yet, at the same time, this was a concert in which many conventional assumptions were overturned. The great performance came with Night Ride and Sunrise, often dismissed as inferior Sibelius because the contrast between its two sections is usually perceived as too great. But as the ride seethed with menace before the brass-rich, Wagnerian sunrise stopped it in its tracks, we were acutely conscious of listening to nothing other than an outright masterpiece. In Tapiola, on the other hand, we were aware of the music's seamless shape, but not of its frightening inner tensions: just for once, the emphasis on the "organic" quality of Sibelius's music was not quite enough.