You could tell that few of the enormous crowd in the Bridgwater Hall were there for Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony, even though Vassily Sinaisky was conducting. (It was a magnificent performance, from its gentlest to its harshest moments, and Sinaisky's control of the design is unassailable.)
The tangible excitement was for the arrival of James MacMillan at the BBC Philharmonic for a three-year stint with the ugly title of Composer/Conductor. That a composer in his early forties can drum up such support is no accident. The ground has been prepared with a care that must gladden the heart of anybody who is at all worried about the future of serious music.
Given his apparently inexhaustible energy, he has begun with a week-long MacMillan in Manchester festival, and there will be another next February. With his aggressive commitment to music in education he has already been working intensively with children at the Manchester Grammar School and Withington Girls' School.
In the opening concert they sang his recent Magnificat, a work that helps to explain why MacMillan has been so successful. The choral writing is remarkably simple: the schoolchildren can have had very little difficulty learning it, and they sang it with an ease and commitment that contributed powerfully to its religious message.
At the same time, though, MacMillan knows how to write for a professional orchestra in a way that challenges them and keeps them on their toes. The two contrasting styles blended bizarrely and with considerable success.
His shorter Exsultet that opened the concert showed an entirely different kind of music: a slow, almost minimalist, accumulation of brass textures that grew to a mighty climax - relatively simple but highly effective.
And then yet another kind of music followed these, his Veni, Veni, Emmanuel. In the eight years since it was composed this has become a classic and seems likely to stay firmly in the repertory as the finest existing percussion concerto: repeated hearing brings to light more and more fascinating internal details in the endlessly resourceful scoring.
As a conductor, MacMillan controlled the varying speeds with considerable skill. But much of its success was due to the solo playing of Colin Currie, whose athletic percussionism blended his almost compulsive showmanship with an increasingly deep musicality.
Even so, the overwhelming impression of the three MacMillan works together was the range of his invention and that there was not a moment that lacked a burning intensity.
We can safely predict that MacMillan's tenure with the BBC Philharmonic will be a continued triumph.
