What, one wonders, would Edward Elgar have made of sodoku? The composer relished brain-teasers; and secured his international reputation with the most notorious musical encryption puzzle ever devised.

Mark Elder's searching account of the Enigma Variations, which launched the Hallé's new season, was not really a study in the work's reverential Englishness - still less an effort to decode it - rather, he placed the piece in the European context of his great contemporary and admirer, Richard Strauss.

The two composers shared a tendency to place themselves at the centre of their work. Most experts now agree that the elusive subject of the Enigma Variations was Elgar himself. No less mysterious is whatever prompted the 24-year-old Strauss to dramatise himself as an old man on the brink of death.

The tone-poem Tod und Verklärung is an extravagant bout of hypochondria, sickly and self-aggrandising by turns, which initially prompted Elder not so much to conduct the work as tend to its fevered brow. But his operatic instincts came to the fore at the climax, steering a secure course through the tumultuous passages depicting the transfiguration of the soul.

Far more intriguing was the rarely heard Song of the Priestess of Apollo, a darkly opulent orchestral song anticipating the soundworld of Strauss's mythical stage works, and delivered with intensity by soprano Anne Schwanewilms as a five-minute mini-opera in its own right.

Elgar's Cockaigne Overture rounded out the programme, and though it engendered a curious sense of displacement to hear the Hallé barrelling through a cockney knees-up, it was the composer himself who once remarked: "I don't think you London johnnies know what orchestral playing is until you hear the Manchester orchestra."