Mark Elder has forgotten something. He strides to the podium, raises his hands, then wheels round to face the audience. "Ladies and gentleman," he apologises, "I don't have the score." Elder departs and sheepishly re-emerges with a copy of Vaughan Williams's overture, The Wasps, which is despatched with buzzing vigour. However, it would have been no great loss if the second item, Hamilton Harty's rarely performed mini-oratorio the Mystic Trumpeter, had remained in the dressing room.

Harty is a key figure in the history of the Hallé - an extravagant, self-taught Irishman whose directorship of the orchestra throughout the 1920s linked the Beecham years to the Sargent/Barbirolli era. As a composer he is best remembered for the symphonic poem, the Children of Lir. But though his setting of Walt Whitman's poem the Mystic Trumpeter was briefly in vogue among Edwardian choral societies, it now sounds like a ponderous piece of late Romanticism that was already 100 years out of date when it was written.

Part of the problem is the material, an expulsion of some of Whitman's most vatic and intractable free verse which climaxes with the chorus shouting in ecstasy, as if Beethoven's Ode to Joy had developed into a football chant. Elder's attentive conducting and the effulgent contribution of baritone James Rutherford are commendable, but cannot disguise the fact that this is an irredeemably second-rate work.

The same cannot be said for Elgar's B minor Violin Concerto, written for one great Austrian violinist, Fritz Kreisler, and here performed by another, Thomas Zehetmair, who breathes so much light and air into the lines that the violin is made to sound like a wind instrument. However respectfully the Hallé honours its 150-year history, performances like this suggest that the golden era may be happening right now.