On the second floor of the Radisson Edwardian Hotel in Manchester, the great musicians associated with the city are commemorated: the Hallé Suite is named for Charles Hallé, founder of Manchester’s great independent orchestra, and there are rooms honouring his successors, Hans Richter, Hamilton Harty, Thomas Beecham, John Barbirolli – the“permanent conductor”, from 1943 until his death in 1970, most indelibly associated with the Hallé Orchestra brand – and the current incumbent, Mark Elder.

Music director since 2000, Elder has to a large extent wiped the slate clean of three decades of solid, but perhaps slightly provincial routine under Barbirolli’s successors, James Loughran (1971-83), Stanislaw Skrowac-zewski (1983-90) and Kent Nagano (1991-2000). Skrowaczewski is still revered as a guest conductor in Manchester, particularly for his interpretations of Bruckner and Shostakovich symphonies, and it was Nagano who led the Hallé into its new home, abandoning the shabby old Free Trade Hall in favour of the glittering new Bridgewater Hall in September 1996.

It has been Elder, however, who has capitalised on the move, transforming not only the fortunes of the orchestra – which almost went bankrupt in 1999 – but his own reputation as a conductor of symphonic music. Now a remarkably elfin 60-year-old, Elder cut his conducting teeth in the opera house, spending 14 memorable years (1979-93) as music director of English National Opera and embracing as wide-ranging an operatic repertoire as any British-based conductor.

Before his Hallé appointment, he was music director of the Rochester Philharmonic, in upstate New York, and a principal guest under the Rattle regime at the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. When Rattle left, the CBSO scorned his “best man” as its bridegroom-to-be. Birmingham’s loss has been Manchester’s gain. In the seven seasons since Elder took the title of the orchestra’s first music director, it has taken its place at the top of the league of British regional orchestras. At the BBC Proms and in its own, studio-made recordings, its work can rival the best London and international bands. Elder and the Hallé have perhaps the best rapport of any conductor/orchestra partnership right now, and their concerts are extravagantly lauded worldwide.

It was fitting, therefore, that Elder was on the podium to celebrate the 150 years since Hallé officially inaugurated a regular symphonic concert season in Manchester on January 30, 1858. As this was a birthday party, the programme was inevitably a hotchpotch of shortish pieces reflecting the Hallé’s past, present and optimistic future. An old Hallé friend, Dame Janet Baker, who retired from singing before the Bridgewater Hall opened, was on hand as presenter, delivering her links with her crystalline diction and a hint of her native Yorkshire accent. Baker is classical-music royalty – her presence was like the opening of a horse show by theQueen – and the traditionally senior, but fiercely loyal, Hallé audience hung on her every word.

She lavished praise on Elder and the orchestra, and on John Tom-linson, replacing an ailing Dmitri Hvorostovsky as the evening’s principal vocal soloist. He delivered powerful, gritty accounts of Philip II’s great solo from Verdi’s Don Carlo, and, wittily, Hans Sachs’s “Elder” (the tree, not the conductor) monologue, from Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. As an encore, he barked Méphistophélès’s Serenade from Gounod’s Faust perhaps a bit too gruffly to woo an ingénue virgin, but doubtless managed to seduce many a Manchester matron.

Elder’s eclectic programming embraced highlights from the orchestra’s illustrious past: Hallé’s passion for Berlioz was celebrated in a swashbuckling account of Le Corsaire, while his prowess as a pianist was recalled in a whizz-bang romp through Weber’s Konzertstück by the young Russian Polina Leschenko, who wowed the audience with her athletic bravura, though she wouldn’t win a prize as the wittiest interpreter of this gleefully parodic piece.

Three works given their world premieres by the Hallé – Thomas Adès’s These Premises Are Alarmed, Constant Lambert’s The Rio Grande and Elgar’s Overture in the South – represented the orchestra’s championship of new music. A brand-new fanfare, Colin Matthews’s A Quick Start, opened the proceedings, played by members of the Hallé Youth Orchestra. The recently formed Hallé Youth Choir joined the mezzo-soprano Anna Stéphany, the pianist Jona-than Scott and the conductor James Burton in Lambert’s brilliantly jazzy South American cantata. Burton is Chorus Master of the Hallé Choir, which brought the first half to a rousing finish with Vaughan William’s Whitman setting Towards the Unknown Region.

The party had to end with Elgar. Elder and the Hallé have already recorded one of the best modern accounts of In the South, and they continue to grow in this music, with resplendent brass, bel canto wind-playing and sumptuous, silky strings, the performance emanating a passionate Mediterranean glow while remaining quintessentially English. In Elgar, they are heirs to the glorious tradition of Richter and Barbirolli. This ravishing In the South whetted the appetite for their Dream of Gerontius, with Alice Coote, Paul Groves and Bryn Terfel as soloists, next season. Even more exciting, a complete Götterdämmerung, over two evenings, is promised.

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