The Artisan Trio’s series of concerts, curated by composers who studied in Edinburgh, continues with the Tbilisi-based Marina Adamia.

A hundred years ago this month, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring caused a disgusted Parisian audience to riot in the stalls at its world premiere.

How strange to hear Mendelssohn’s Elijah in German. Yet how wonderfully that clean, clipped language helps cleanse the English translation, created – and stubbornly maintained ever since – for the oratorio’s mid-19th century Birmingham premiere, of its sentimental Victorian fatuousness.

How strange to hear Mendelssohn’s Elijah in German. Yet how wonderfully that clean, clipped language helps cleanse the familiar English translation, created – and stubbornly maintained ever since – for the oratorio’s mid-19th century Birmingham premiere, of its sentimental Victorian fatuousness.

STRAVINSKY reckoned that the conductor should be little more than a time beater.

THE most astonishing thing about the opening concert in Ilan Volkov and the BBC SSO’s two-day Tectonics festival was the number of people who turned out to see it.

You can always rely on the American pianist, conductor and academic Robert Levin to come up with something out of the ordinary. Not just in the way he performs Mozart, but in the repertoire he digs up to go with it.

The final two concerts in the RCS’s Plug festival were given over entirely to students. Early on Saturday evening the focus shone on composers and performers from the JuniorConservatoire, and a series of works that revealed, in these late school-age students, a genuine hunger for creative exploration.

“WE’D start, but we’re missing our mezzo soprano”. Red Note Ensemble’s conductor Jessica Cottis would probably have preferred to open last night’s Plug concert less apologetically.

IT’S strange to think that Beethoven’s Symphony No7 is two centuries old – especially as it has never sounded so fresh or modern as in this thrilling performance by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.

IN THE second of the RSNO’s American Festival concerts, the composers were well-known, but not all of the music.

WITH yet another programme featuring a single piece of Benjamin Britten at its core, you’d expect the novelty of the current pan-orchestra Britten 100 week to be wearing off.

A HUMBLE afternoon radio concert it may have been, but what a belter of a show the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra put on – driven, vivid and full of life.

Billed as the Scottish Ensemble’s Homecoming Tour – the svelte string orchestra is just back from an 11-city tour of the United States – last night’s concert also slotted neatly into the week-long Britten 100 series, the result of a rare co-ordinated planning exercise by Scotland’s main orchestral ensembles.

You don’t so much go to a Nigel Kennedy concert as enter his world for the evening – a world of daft, punchline-less jokes, football shirts, incongruous swearing and winks to the audience.