There's a new performance time and a new look for the Hallé, which began its first complete series of matinée concerts by abandoning evening dress in favour of an assortment of business suits. Though it's about time that dress codes left the 19th century, it has to be said that the orchestra now looks less like a colony of penguins than a firm of accountants.

The programme was also subject to some hasty revision, with Lesley Garrett sadly indisposed due to the death of her mother. But trumpeter Alison Balsom, fresh from her triumphant acting debut at the Globe and coronation as Gramophone classical artist of the year could hardly be a more spectacular replacement. Her assault of the treacherous loops and turns of Haydn's trumpet concerto wasn't completely flawless, though the part was originally written for a test pilot bold enough to put an early version of the valve trumpet through its paces.

Balsom can play anything however, as she proved with a rapier-sharp account of Piazzola's Libertango on a modern, muted instrument, followed by a dusky arrangement of Gershwin's Someone to Watch Over Me, for which she switched to the crepuscular-sounding flugelhorn. It is commonplace to observe that Balsom produces a singing tone: yet no vocalist has yet proved capable of switching from bright soprano to sultry mezzo by swapping out their larynx.

Elsewhere in the programme, Barber's Adagio for Strings drifted past like a profound sigh; while the Tristan-like romantic crisis at the heart of Bax's tone poem Tintagel sounded like a man reaching a crossroads in his love-life and becoming enshrouded in Celtic mist. Elgar's Enigma Variations is meat and drink to Elder and the Hallé, yet the care and attention given to the performance simply served to illustrate the quality of the feast on offer.