Pulse Festival, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester

It's difficult to pinpoint the heart of a festival as big and diffuse as Spirit of Friendship, a six-month cultural celebration and exploration of Commonwealth arts. But Manchester is undoubtedly where its heart beats – the Bridgewater Hall has been at the throbbing centre of a two week-long festival of rhythm. Evelyn Glennie and Oldham-born Wayne Marshall have drummed up artists from all corners of the Commonwealth to create fusion between classical, jazz and world music. Percussion has given a flamboyant pitch to the programming and if you can't beat it, it's probably not part of Pulse. Whether your taste is didgeridoo, gamelan or gongs, there's been no lack of opportunity to shake, rattle and roll.

Mixing symphony orchestra and jazz band doesn't sound like a recipe for success, but sparks fairly flew between the Lincoln Center Jazz Band under its bandleader, the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, and the BBC Philharmonic. In the first half the jazz band displayed technical skill in a selection of Ellington standards, showing their ease in his distinctive style with brilliant flashes of virtuosity, especially from Herlin Riley on drums. Marsalis took centre-stage later when, after an awesome display of impossibly fast phrases and haunting, crystal clear tone, he demonstrated exactly why he is the most famous and respected jazz musician today.

After the interval the members of the BBC Phil joined the band in some of Marsalis's punchy arrangements of Ellington. Wayne Marshall conducted, before taking his seat at the piano to dazzle and delight in improvisation with the jazz players.

While there was much to admire at the closing concert of Pulse, it didn't send out the kind of waves the rest of the festival had generated. It wasn't that the Hallé didn't play with style, or that Mark Elder's conducting lacked commitment, or that the starry soloists didn't shine, it just didn't quite work as a programme.

At its centre was a colourful new concerto for percussion, piano and orchestra (and a prominent harp part, too) by New Zealand's John Psathas. Evelyn Glennie darted between a battery of percussion, but not even she managed to hit everything. With a perfectly straight face, Elder managed to bang the instruments allocated to the conductor, while maintaining the beat, turning the pages of his score, and keeping all the players and solo pianist Philip Smith on track in perfect time.

This would have been an ideal opportunity to feature one of Manchester's composers alongside Psathas, but instead the concerto was framed, oddly, with Elgar's sprawling, Med-iterranean-inspired overture In the South and Respighi's Pines of Rome – its brutal march rhythms echoing not just bygone glories, but perhaps also the Fascism that shadowed the composer's life. Wayne Marshall kept detail and overview in perfect balance, improvising at the piano on Gershwin's evocative Summertime.

Dame Kiri Te Kanawa gave a poised account of four Italian operatic arias, but she was in a realm just out of our emotional reach until her encore, an unaccompanied Maori song that clearly touched a chord in the large audience, prompting a spontaneous outburst of humming along. A pity the rest of the concert wasn't quite so involving.