"I have written out my soul," said Edward Elgar of his consummate, confessional Violin Concerto (1910), which filled the first half of Friday's concert by the Minnesota Orchestra. The conductor, making his first appearance here since 2003, was Sir Neville Marriner, the orchestra's music director from 1979 to 1986; the masterly soloist was veteran concertmaster Jorja Fleezanis.

Though Fleezanis has only lately taken up the Elgar concerto, she seems to have this music in her DNA. From her first perfectly gauged entrance, she managed to sound strong and vulnerable, declarative and reserved all at once; she danced Elgar's dance of self-revelation and self-concealment with uncanny sensitivity. Her tone was almost corporeal, especially in the violin's lower register; her ravishing pianissimos drew the listener toward her instrument. (The occasional smudged note mattered not at all.)

Among many goosebump moments, I would single out the rapt close of the Andante (where, in the composer's words, "two souls merge and melt into one another") and the memory-haunted, stream-of-consciousness cadenza in the final movement, in which the masks are dropped and violinist-protagonist's soul is laid bare. This is enthralling music, and I've never heard it played with such heart.

It was once fashionable to deride Elgar, whose sesquicentennial was celebrated last year, as the composer laureate of pomp-pumped, hubris-ridden Edwardian England. But more recently, the melancholy that underlies the grandeur (as biographer Diana McVeagh has put it) has become easier to hear, and the debunkers have gone largely silent. Is an Elgar revival afoot?

In his parallel career as a conductor, Elgar often led music by Johannes Brahms. The two composers make natural program-mates -- and Brahms' greatest symphony, the grim Fourth, is in no danger of being eclipsed by Elgar's concerto.

Marriner, 84 this month, mounted the podium with some difficulty but was fully in command of the orchestra. His preoccupations in the symphony seemed to be clarity of texture, depth of string tone and accuracy of attack. All these emphases paid dividends. What I missed was the forward motion so vital to Brahms. Friday's performance briefly caught fire toward the end of the first movement, but on the whole it lacked the thrust and momentum that can lift this stern music from the page and burn it into the memory.

Larry Fuchsberg writes often about music.