Hamburg’s new concert hall is Germany’s latest austerity-defying architectural bobby-dazzler. But what about the music? How do you mark the opening of a lustrous new hall that is now, after all the arguments and the overspend, the pride of Hamburg? The conventional thing to do would be to programme a mighty work of the heavens — Beethoven’s Ninth, Haydn’s Creation, or maybe throw down the gauntlet with a specially commissioned new piece.

Thomas Hengelbrock and his renamed NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchester took a different approach for an opening night attended by German president Joachim Gauck, who made a speech, and chancellor Angela Merkel – back in her native city for the occasion – who didn’t. The opening ceremony interwove speeches and a tribute to Hamburg’s two native musical giants, Mendelssohn and Brahms, with the Roy Blas overture and the finale of the second symphony respectively.

A 360-degree view of the opening concert

But the main concert that followed was above all a tribute to Hengelbrock’s imagination and the possibilities of the hall. The first notes, floated from up in the balconies, were Britten’s oboe invocation of Pan, from the Ovid Metamorphoses, a beguiling choice. This opened a sequence, skilfully managed by Hengelbrock to avoid interruptions for applause, of modern and late-renaissance pieces — Dutilleux then Cavalieri, Zimmermann followed by Praetorius, Liebermann eliding into Caccini, with the countertenor Philippe Jaroussky caressing the notes from high in the hall. The closing movement of Messiaen’s Turangalîla brought the first half to a storming close.

The grand opening of the Elbphilharmonie, Hamburg Photograph: Ralph Larmann

Hengelbrock pulled a second sequential trick in part two, opening with a perfunctory account of the prelude to Wagner’s Parsifal which exposed the limitations of the home orchestra, before moving without a break into Wolfgang Rihm’s new orchestral song cycle Reminiszenz. Commissioned for the occasion in honour of the Hamburg writer Hans Henny Jahnn, and stylishly sung by the tenor Pavol Breslik, Rihm’s characteristically eclectic setting of some notably bleak texts then gave way to the least bleak of all musical settings, the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth. Hengelbrock’s account was business-like rather than truly joyous but a fine quartet of soloists including Sir Bryn Terfel gave the account something special to grace what is without question a hall to celebrate.