Was it the Hallé’s little joke to open a polling-day programme with a performance of Charles Ives’s the Unanswered Question? Ives’s unorthodox and enigmatic creation from 1908 appeared to be the ultimate musical example of trying and failing to reach a consensus: an unseen string ensemble played a softly ethereal chorale while a persistent trumpet interrogated four increasingly discordant flautists lined up on stage.

Markus Stenz enhanced the drama by performing the piece in near-darkness and concealing the strings in the highest reaches of the gallery. The concert marked the conclusion of Stenz’s tenure as the Halle’s principal guest conductor; and also of the orchestra’s associate composer, Helen Grime, who marked her departure with the most ambitious and formally satisfying piece she has written for the Hallé so far.

Grime’s Double Concerto was a bespoke work tailored to the lyrical abilities of the Hallé’s principal clarinet and trumpet players, Lynsey Marsh and Gareth Small. The two-movement work opened with some iridescent interval leaps reminiscent of Benjamin Britten’s Sea Interlude: Sunday Morning, and developed into a series of protean episodes in which the two soloists dovetailed and diverged. Particularly intriguing was Marsh and Small’s ability to mimic one another’s sonorities, particularly when the latter switched to flugelhorn for a crepuscular passage that brought Mahler’s Nachtmusik to mind.

William Walton’s First Symphony, created against the background of the composer’s break-up with his partner, is one of the few to possess a movement marked con malizio (with malice). Stenz’s reading of the scherzo was suitably vitriolic. Yet the sudden, euphoric acceleration of the finale, written three years later than the rest of the symphony, seemed to have as little connection with what had preceded it as the exit polls published shortly after the concert’s conclusion.