Say what you like about the Royal Albert Hall acoustics, at least in the Proms we get to hear familiar and unfamiliar orchestras performing on a level playing field. Last weeks’ concerts were particularly interesting as we got to sample Manchester’s two symphony orchestras on consecutive nights. Both are used to the crisp and direct acoustics of The Bridgewater Hall, but the sonic gauze that the RAH lays over any orchestra’s sound reveals as much as it hides.

The Hallé’s Sibelius playing on Thursday was some of the neatest and most idiomatic I’ve heard. Mark Elder has instilled in the orchestra a relaxed confidence in playing those delicate Sibelian string figurations and woodwind sequences that most other UK orchestras simply can’t match; too often with other ensembles you don’t feel as though those tricky textures are secure enough, so they can’t shift colour chameleon-like as those of the Hallé did on Thursday. The big, troublesome acoustic of the Albert Hall has a twofold effect: to an extend it really lets those quiet background textures breathe, but it also makes you listen out for them – and their refraction around the building itself.

That sound – or the management of it – is new to the Hallé. It wasn’t part of the orchestra’s more modest textural armoury nine years ago when I was an usher at The Bridgewater Hall and would hear the Halle on a Thursday and the BBC Phil on a Saturday most weeks. It felt a bit like those ‘good old days’ last week; 24 hours after hearing the Hallé I was in the same seat for the BBC Philharmonic’s concert led by its Chief Conductor Designate, Juanjo Mena.

Spaniard Mena is a fascinating choice for the BBC Phil, firstly because the orchestra is one of few in the UK to have developed a southern-European podium tradition (Gianandra Noseda followed Yan-Pascal Tortelier) and secondly because it’s always had a trademark ‘bite’ – described to me once by Sir Mark Elder, who worked with the BBC Phil long before he made his Hallé debut, as ‘a distinct confidence…a cut-and-thrust’. When you hear those qualities punching out so snappily from the distant RAH stage, the effect is even more virile than in the sharper Bridgewater Hall – particularly when it echoes back at you.

The BBC Philharmonic has never lost those sharp, agile qualities. Back in 2002, I thought the orchestra was often at its best in Shostakovich under Vassily Sinaisky – precisely because of that collective ‘bite’ which always flew off the page so scarily. The sultry, hot Spanish and French music Mena conducted on Friday actually demands a very similar sort of acidic, reactionary footing. Mena released it all with a smile, but more than that he let his orchestra play – it was an invitation to the dance rather than an ‘I’m from Spain and I know how this one goes’.

If any BBC Phil players had been knocking around SW3 the night before their Prom, they’d have been well advised to catch their fellow Mancunians’ Sibelius. Though the Hallé and Elder arguably manage those delicate crosshatch textures in Sibelius better than any right now, it’s the BBC Philharmonic that’s about to record a Sibelius symphony cycle. Lucky for the Beeb players that they have John Storgårds to conduct it – a rarely less than compelling Sibelius interpreter who might well find more than pretty textures in the music, however startling and illuminating those textures can prove.