Welcome to a unique Hallé season marking the 150th anniversary of the Hallé's first concert.

The year's Opus One series includes the usual mix of great works but some have a special significance for the orchestra in its anniversary year.

In February, Cristian Mandeal conducts Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique, a masterpiece that received its first British performance by the Hallé in 1879 under Sir Charles Hallé, the orchestra's founder, who had met Berlioz in Paris. In October, Yan Pascal Tortelier, familiar to Manchester audiences, conducts three pieces from Berlioz's The Damnation of Faust - another work that Hallé conducted, introducing it to British audiences.

In May, I will conduct concerts that include two more works of which the Hallé gave the British premieres - Glinka's overture to A Life for the Tsar and Shostakovich's precocious First Symphony, written when he was 19 and heard in Britain at a Manchester concert in 1932 directed by Sir Hamilton Harty. Between these two masterpieces comes Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto performed by Alina Pogostkina, who plays with great verve and huge emotional understanding.

Earlier in the season, in November, the acclaimed mezzo-soprano Sarah Connolly joins us in performances of Mahler's Rückert-Lieder in a concert that also includes Dvo?rák's Symphony No.6, one of his best.

In December, Edward Gardner, formerly the Hallé's Assistant Conductor and now Music Director of English National Opera, returns for a programme featuring one of Mozart's favourite violin concertos and Tchaikovsky's 'Fate-driven' Symphony No.4. In my January concerts, Sunwook Kim - winner of the 2006 Leeds International Piano Competition - returns to play Brahms's First Piano Concerto in a programme which ends with Beethoven's dancing Symphony No.7. I am especially delighted that my senior colleague and one-time Hallé Music Director, Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, is able to return in March for a programme that includes Beethoven's Third Piano Concerto and Brahms's Symphony No.1.

Please join us at The Bridgewater Hall for this very special anniversary season.