Manchester's Piano 2009 festival opened with its artistic director, Barry Douglas, playing both of the Brahms Concertos in a single evening - which could be construed as courageous or foolhardy, depending on how you view it. Brahms's piano concertos are arguably the most remarkable in the entire repertoire. But they are also among the most demanding, and to play them together requires levels of stamina, concentration and emotional commitment that are beyond most pianists, even those otherwise comfortable with one or other of the concertos in performance.

Douglas confounded expectations on a number of fronts. There were occasional interpretative flaws, but what he was attempting never came off as a stunt. He played with seemingly boundless reserves of energy, and his only lapse of concentration was due to someone's decision to place a pause after the opening movement of the First Concerto to admit latecomers, who then took forever to get to their seats. The subsequent Adagio, unsurprisingly, lacked shape and poetry as a result.

Given Douglas's reputation as a hard-hitting pianist, one assumed he would be better suited to the rhetoric of the First Concerto than the supposed serenity of the Second. The reverse was true. Lyricism was sometimes subordinated to declamation in the First, while the sheer weight of his playing brought out qualities of moodiness and drama in the Second that we don't hear as often as we should. The orchestra was the Hallé, the conductor Yan Pascal Tortelier - a striking, unusual combination. His approach was high-Romantic and expansive; the Hallé's sound, meanwhile, is appealingly dark in Brahms, sometimes at the expense of clarity. Superb stuff, despite occasional imperfections.