Capturing all the emotional intensity but also fully exploring all the cerebral undercurrents within the music, the orchestra under the assured direction of Elder – until recently music director of Manchester’s Halle Orchestra – was on top form throughout the evening.

There was a dramatically fiery symphonic-like start before pianist Sir Stephen Hough (pictured), poised elegantly and thoughtfully at the piano stool, sidled effortlessly into Brahms’ great romantic First Piano Concerto in D minor.

Playing a theme full of tenderness before building to the more heroic passages, the large audience looked transfixed by the pianist’s dexterity in such a technically challenging work that took Brahms four years to 1858 to complete.

Quietly majestic in his playing and in total coordination with the orchestra, Hough avoided the temptation to wallow in the melodies but to acknowledge the seriousness and obliqueness of the concerto.

It was composed after Brahms’ mentor Robert Schumann attempted suicide and its second movement was a portrait of Robert’s wife Clara with whom he had an uncertain relationship.

Hough maintained the emotional and technical equilibrium through to the dashing final movement supported brilliantly by the horns, clarinets and oboes and ending in a grand high-spirited virtuosic conclusion, after which he returned to the stage for the applause four times before playing a solo encore.

Clearly a huge fan, Mark Elder told the audience that he thought Janáček was “one of the most individual voices of the 20th century”. In introducing his tone poem The Fiddler’s Child composed in 1914, he spoke about his use of instrumental association to give his interpretations of a Czech poem about the death of a village fiddler’s child and as a lament for an oppressed nation.

From a violin passage – played beautifully by CBSO leader Eugene Tzikindelean – representing the fiddler’s promise of a ‘golden future’ for his child and an oboe signifying the child was dying, to the indifference and cruelty of the mayor represented by cello and bass, and the defiance of the villages by four violas, the CBSO performed the ten-minute piece with charm and poignancy.

Shostakovich showed his own individualism with his rarely performed Sixth Symphony in B minor, from 1939, with people at the time expecting something as equally optimistic and triumphant as his Fifth Symphony which ‘rehabilitated’ him after his experimental Fourth in the eyes of Stalin’s Soviet regime.

Yet the orchestra brought out his true art in the sad brooding music of the long first movement as you wondered where the darkness would lead before evaporating. It was a surprise to hear the second movement bouncing with rhythm and excitement as the mood changed markedly from tragedy to comedy.

The final movement seemed to gallop to the finish in a foot-tappingly listenable way, the CBSO providing a rich rhythmical intensity and strong showpiece support from flute, clarinet and cor anglais especially. You could not help but believe this was Shostakovich just as he would have wished – slightly mocking of authority but in the main simply enjoying himself.

The CBSO will perform Jean Sibelius’s Symphony No 5, along with Sergei Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No 2 with Yeol Eum Son as soloist, and William Grant Still’s Threnody (In Memory of Jean Sibelius) at 2.15 pm on Thursday, October 24th at Symphony Hall. For tickets call 0121 780 3333 or book online at cbso.co.uk.