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Renaud Capuçon's Mendelssohn and a strong Schumann 2 make up for a rocky start in Edinburgh.

Despite the longueurs of the piece, this performance of Solomon was pretty much perfect. 

A replacement conductor and soloists demonstrate brillance in Dvořák and Schubert in Edinburgh.

François Leleux both conducts and plays the oboe in Edinburgh, initiating a strong partnership with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.

The SCO’s strings play as though they had an insight into the composer’s psyche that few could share. 

The Scottish Chamber Orchestra also have a winner in a radiant Vaughan Williams Symphony no. 5.

Is there any instrument more bittersweet than the viola? The violin does the acrobatics, the cello is more conventionally beautiful, but the viola sits in the middle of the orchestral palette like no other instrument. Neither high nor low, it’s perfectly placed to embody the contradictory and the conflicted, ideal for a sense of desire denied or of fulfilment deferred.

Vasks’ Viola Concerto receives its Scottish première with Maxim Rysanov and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra as they explore music and nature in the Baltic, Rome and America.

Robin Ticciati's final season with the SCO begins with some promising Dvořák. 

A refreshing Austro-German programme of works that neatly dovetailed into each other, presented with energy by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and Robin Ticciati.

Nicola Benedetti on astonishing form with Beethoven’s Violin Concerto with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra in Edinburgh.

A high-level concert with some interesting choices of interpretation – sometimes fascinating, sometimes a bit too bold.

Scottish Chamber Orchestra and Chorus were on top form, joined by a team of Baroque soloists under Handel expert Harry Bicket to produce a memorable Theodora.

Tender Sibelius, Mozart brimming with personality and heroic Beethoven in the opening concert of the sixth Lammermuir Fetival. 

A successful concert hall Rake's Progress at the Edinburgh International Festival with an impressively strong cast of singers, Scottish Chamber Orchestra and Royal Conservatoire Voices under Sir Andrew Davis.

A sparkling new work from John McLeod throws light on the celebration of 150 years of Sibelius and Nielsen.

Three concertos and a symphony; three soloists and an ever-expanding chamber orchestra; the SCO in Stravinsky, Mozart and Beethoven.

Llŷr Williams, Alexander Janiczek and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra in a triple concerto evening.

The Scottish Chamber Orchesra, under John Storgårds, in a programme of story, stage and music.

Scottish Chamber Orchestra's opening concert of Hosikawa's Harp Concerto and Mahler's Fourth was a study of man and nature. It also offered a welcome chance to hear mezzo Karen Cargill singing to her home crowd.

The Proms celebrate the 80th birthday of one of the UK's most fascinating and engaging composers with musical images of fierce weather and strong whisky.

An imaginative and wonderfully performed programme of ecclesiastical works wrought in peril, alienation and exile.

Ute Lemper's barnstorming performance of songs from the Weimar Republic chimes perfectly with the Edinburgh Festival's barbed-wire-and-bluebell logo for 2014.

SCO musicians perform an engaging afternoon of Eastern European chamber music for wind, strings and piano.

Rossen Gergov conducts a Slavonic Dance sandwich with Haydn and Ligeti filling, Tasmin Little starring in the latter's Violin Concerto.

Alan Coady reviews Christian Zacharias and the Scottish Chamber in Mozart, Haydn, Ravel & Poulenc at Edinburgh's Queen's Hall.

Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Scottish Chamber Orchestra composer in residence in the late 1980s, seemed an appropriate choice to write a piece for this, the orchestra’s 40th anniversary year. As the title suggests, Concert Overture: Ebb of Winter was written during the approach of Spring this year and portrays the changing seasons in Maxwell Davies’ adopted homeland of Orkney.

A Sunday afternoon Queen’s Hall event is usually a more intimate affair than an evening concert; only the downstairs level is open and, although the Side Stalls on this occasion were fairly sparsely populated, the Centre Stalls were full with attentive and responsive audience members.

Pre-concert talks need not brim with revelation to be rewarding. Another’s perspective can be enough to alter perception of a programme and resonance thereafter. Such was the case with Dr. Elaine Kelly's talk before this SCO concert entitled “The Pity of War”. Key to reflections on the relationship between war and music was diversity of approach.

The Scottish Chamber Orchestra made a welcome return to the Proms after two years’ absence (their last appearance was in the late night Prom in 2010), led by their youthful principal conductor Robin Ticciati, who has already been in the post for four years. They brought a programme showcasing the early 19th-century repertoire which Ticciati has recently been exploring with this orchestra.

A concert programme can resemble a puzzle; searching for links and contrasts often results in a more enjoyable, unified experience. I therefore strove to arrive in sufficient time for a careful reading of the programme notes for this performance by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra at Usher Hall, part of the Edinburgh International Festival.

This second of two SCO Britten centenary concerts saw its subject juxtaposed with two living British composers and Mozart. Cynics might consider the closing Symphony no. 40 in G minor (1788) a reward for surviving the rest of the programme’s modernity.

Endeavouring to travel lightly through the world, I tend not to collect programme notes. However, such was the quality of Jo Kirkbride’s notes for this SCO Britten centenary celebration that scanning them for e-posterity is tempting. They prompted a consideration of the whole idea of programming.

Size mattered in this programme, whether in the form of piano originals filled out to orchestral proportions, or Romantic reach reined in by Classical sensibility. The evening’s opening gesture was down to one man, Ian White, whose muted trombone ushered in Webern’s orchestration of the Ricercar from Bach’s 1747 Musical Offering.

Who better to direct an all-Haydn programme than Adam Fischer? Co-founder of the Haydn Festival, he also founded the Austro-Hungarian Haydn Orchestra, who recorded the composer’s entire symphonic output in Haydn Hall of the Esterházy Palace, Eisenstadt, Haydn’s former place of employment.

This creative SCO programme offered two works in either half, performed in reverse chronological order. Virtuoso violinist Alexander Janiczek directed the first of each pair, beginning with Schubert’s 1817 Overture in D major “In the Italian Style”, D.590.

Written for oboist Nicholas Daniel and first performed in Birmingham in 2010, there was excitement and anticipation in Perth for James MacMillan’s Oboe Concerto receiving its Scottish première.The Scottish Chamber Orchestra with soloist François Leleux gave a virtuosic performance of this thought-provoking work, conducted by Thierry Fischer.

What better start to a near capacity crowd concert than Mendelssohn's rousing Overture in C Major, Op101. It contains everything required to suggest a promising evening's music: pace, sparkling orchestration, energising counterpoint, dramatic dynamics and panache.

Finland’s Einojuhani Rautavaara is no stranger to the SCO, who premièred his Autumn Gardens in 1999; nor to this concert’s conductor, fellow Finn John Storgårds, who recorded a disc of his works earlier this year. Although not a world première, this was a UK first performance of his Into the Heart of Light for string orchestra.

Picture the scene: Dunbar Parish Church nearing the end of major renovation. Looking heavenward, one sees two RSJ-type structures which appear to have facilitated the removal of all impediments to vision and light, the latter refracted through stained glass windows. In one corner of of the resulting square, facing the opposite corner, sit the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.

'First impressions are often the truest', wrote Hazlitt. I was immediately struck by the amount of space on the Usher Hall stage, recently filled by so many large symphony orchestras. The Scottish Chamber Orchestra had plenty of space, a feature which was soon to be borne out in the music.

It must be heart-warming for a young composer, sharing the bill with Beethoven and Stravinsky, to know that the programme has been named after her piece. The clear, confident writing in Helen Grime's A Cold Spring (2009) effectively conveyed the visual contrast offered by sharp-edged, bright days at this time of year.

How do you like your Baroque? Extreme – all gut strings and not a chin-rest in sight? Or mid-twentieth century – molto vibrato with saxophone obbligato? There is, of course, a half way house, and in last night’s packed Queen’s Hall in Edinburgh, the SCO steered firmly towards it, producing several agreeable surprises along the way.

The seemingly endless variety of conducting styles in existence intrigues me. This is particularly striking when one conductor displays three styles, in as many pieces, in a single concert. Joseph Swenson (Conductor Emeritus of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra) began this programme by guiding the SCO through Stravinsky's Concerto in E flat, 'Dumbarton Oaks' (1937).

Edinburgh's Queen's Hall, combining centre stalls with a horseshoe of pews on two levels, boasts a wonderful chamber music acoustic. The attentive Sunday afternoon audience for the SCO Chamber Concert had no difficulty making out every nuance of the small forces present.

I would be surprised if, by the end of the evening, I'd been the only one to suspect a hidden pun in the programme's title, 'In The Steppes of Central Europe'. All three pieces shared a dance element. You would expect this from Kodály's Dances of Galánta.

An element of conflict inhabits the combination of an evening out and a requiem mass. This thought ran through my mind as I approached Edinburgh's Usher Hall, the sunny foreground of which was populated by happy-looking concert-goers greeting friends.

A significantly smaller than usual audience was present for the SCO’s ‘Symphonic Opera’ concert, the finale of its St Andrews season. In the days leading up to thee concert, there was some disgruntlement from people about the programme – “Another Haydn symphony” was a common complaint, the Orchestra having put on several in St Andrews recently.

The Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s concerts in St Andrews are usually full-house events in the University’s Younger Hall, with recent repertoire covering Mozart piano concertos and Haydn symphonies at some length. This evening’s programme promised something quite different: four works celebrating ‘words and music’, as part of the StAnza poetry festival.