Sir Mark Elder and the Hallé were making something of a statement in this concert. Gone was the extended platform, gone the distanced orchestral seating of the past 18 months or so (strings now back to shared music stands), and the programme (also a live broadcast on Radio 3) was both adventurous and, one hopes, attractive, with a star soloist and a barn-storming finale.

A poet I know once went to a boarding school to deliver an open class on poetry. Part of the day consisted of the children producing poems of their own, which their guest teacher then looked over and discussed with them. Almost every one was about flight, or escape into vast, open swathes of nature. These weren’t poems, he realised, these were the yearning, silent screams of perpetual prisoners.

Who will write the world’s first eco-concerto? Tom Coult, with his major debut piece for the BBC Philharmonic since becoming its Composer in Association, a violin concerto titled Pleasure Garden, has made his bid.

The youthful New Zealand-born conductor Gemma New and British cellist Laura van der Heijden between them set the Hallé quite a challenge at this concert.

The music was all written in the past 75 years or so – by classical measures that’s pretty recent – and not by any means standard repertoire. And, written for large orchestra in complex scoring in each case, it made considerable demands. They rose to almost all of them with passion and skill and won a generous reception for their efforts. 

The joint enterprise of soloist Jean-Efflam Bavouzet and conductor Gábor Takács-Nagy, with Manchester Camerata, in recording publicly all Mozart’s piano concertos alongside his opera overtures – with the project theme “Mozart, made in Manchester” – was rudely interrupted after 2019 by you-know-what. 

Tabita Berglund is that rare species, an up-and-coming orchestral conductor attracting enough attention to secure repeated international bookings in even these straitened times. She also happens to be female and young, which until relatively recently would have been seen as another major handicap to success.

After listening to Miracle on repeat, the impression which lingers is that its creator has assimilated a lot of music. First and third album Big Star, Magnetic Fields, The Left Banke, the non-rock side of Abbey Road, Nilsson, Lloyd Cole, Plush, Emitt Rhodes, the poppy side of Field Music, a smidge of Elliott Smith, the swoon of Brian Wilson. Yet the result is a coherent song cycle with its own flavour. Classic, yet fresh. Familiar, but different.

Did you wonder what all those creative musicians and artists did when they couldn’t perform in public last winter? Some of them started making films. Putting film of yourself online was, after all, a way of communicating with an audience, and had the bonus of being a potential promotional shop window for your work once people were allowed back in venues again.

James, and Tim Booth in particular, have always been too genuinely, gauchely odd to be hip – outsiders at the Madchester rave yet responsible for one of its biggest anthems, “Sit Down”, then shedding their skin for suppler, sexual territory with Laid, an Eno collaboration which opened their sound and self-image into something both gauzier and raw, but trailed behind his stadium-ambient U2 smashes.

“You have to be careful you’re not judging the piece,” cautioned a pearl-necklaced Nicholas Daniel, great oboist and winner of the 1980 BBC Young Musician (of the Year, as it then was).