It was a long round-trip, just to celebrate Mendelssohn’s bicentenary. But needs must. Only by being in Spain last week was it possible to hear a British orchestra play all five of his symphonies on two consecutive nights — and to packed houses, too, amid the fountains of the Palau de la Musica in Valencia.

Don’t ask me how it’s economically possible for a Spanish promoter to fly the 200-odd players and singers of the Hallé Orchestra and Choir from England for this magnificent celebration, but not for the cycle to be mounted in Manchester or London. All I know is that it’s rather sad. Hearing these five symphonies performed with such verve in quick succession, under Mark Elder’s taut and imaginative direction, disclosed more about Mendelssohn than any number of disparate Elijahs and random Midsummer Night’s Dream overtures.

For one thing, they revealed that Mendelssohn, for all his protean productivity, never went the same way twice. Only Beethoven’s symphonies offer comparable diversity. Mendelssohn’s First — written at 15! — is rarely played, yet here it emerged as a miracle of imaginative assimilation: Beethovenian rhythmic energy married to Schubertian lyricism, with extraordinary harmonic twists and a fabulously unexpected oasis of pizzicato in an otherwise stormy finale.

The Second, the Lobgesang or “Hymn of Praise” (pungently and tunefully delivered by the Hallé Choir), is far grander, with shades of Beethoven’s Ninth hanging over its slow movement and of course its choral finale. But it, too, has something refreshingly unexpected — a graceful valse triste after a surging first movement.

The Italian, Reformation and Scottish symphonies — harnessed together in one exhilarating programme — are better known. But Elder’s interpretations dispelled the aura of comfortable mid-Victorian sentimentality that sometimes seems to smother the real Mendelssohn. Occasionally Elder’s resolve to move the music on seemed to catch his players unawares: the Italian’s finale, for instance, was blisteringly fast. But what transfixing textures he found in the Reformation, particularly the vibrato-less strings conjuring the mists of antiquity at the start.

Mendelssohn emerged not as a pillar of the bourgeousie, but more like a German Berlioz: a passionate young man bursting with blazingly original structural ideas, literary and landscape allusions and a hundred damn good tunes — but with far fewer years to put the dots on paper. Genial, maybe; superficial never. Don’t miss the Hallé playing the Lobgesang at the Proms on July 30.

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