After a year as music director of the Hallé, Mark Elder plainly has the full confidence of the orchestra. Refreshed after the summer, and with a few new faces, they sound new-minted. Their performance of Verdi's Requiem glittered with a range of colours and textures that show how carefully Elder has worked on the score.

It is hard to think of any conductor who can get quite that stillness of the opening, or quite the bleakness of that astonishing chord at the end of the Dies Irae. Most of all, though, it was a performance in which every note had its right place; Elder has absolute control of the work's grand form. In this piece, you need either voices that can ride pianissimo over the wind section, or voices that are clear and in tune. These days, you can't get both, and Elder went for clarity.

As a last-minute replacement, Judith Howarth floated the soprano lines with supreme confidence; if she is not a singer who will allow a consonant or vowel to get in the way of a good high note, she is still as fine as you can get for this kind of music.

Anne-Marie Owens led the trio of lower soloists with searching anguish coupled with rock-solid precision; Paul Charles Clarke managed to combine a truly Italianate tenor sound with superbly judged balance; and the Bulgarian bass Orlin Anastassov made you feel that no other singer in the world could sing that music with such beauty and compassion.

But it was the chorus that counted most. The combination of the Hallé Choir and the Leeds Festival Chorus seems to be a regular fixture and a very positive development; their massed sounds were spellbinding - not just the precision of the complex music in the Sanctus, but the terrifying hushed whispers at Quantus tremor est futures and the fearless climax in the last movement. This is what really makes the piece work - and it gives grounds for major optimism about the coming season.