LAST night’s Usher Hall concert in celebration of the Qatar UK 2013 Year of Culture was quite an occasion.

Last night’s Usher Hall concert in celebration of the Qatar UK 2013 Year of Culture was quite an occasion.

In a programme where Richard Strauss’s early Piano Quartet should have been the one familiar work, even it – dating from his pre-Rosenkavalier days – bore an unfamiliarity that spoke more of Brahms than the adventurous composer who was soon to deliver the fierce expressionism of Elektra and Salomé.

LIKE much of Brahms, the D Minor Piano Concerto balances Romantic passion with classical restraint.

THE Scottish Ensemble’s final concert of the 2012-13 season was titled Q2: Quartets Squared, because the programme’s two substantial works were string quartets arranged for string orchestra.

Among the many aspirational aspects of the Cottier’s Chamber Project is the performance opportunities it gives to young, inexperienced ensembles such as the Athenaeum Winds, a group privileged to be supported by Enterprise Music Scotland’s residency project.

AS PART of the West End Festival, the Cottiers Chamber Project presented no less than three concerts yesterday, the last of which featured the wonderful Pavel Haas String Quartet.

The RSNO’s new music director, Peter Oundjian, ended his first season with the orchestra on a theatrical note.

THIS scintillating performance of well-known classics, on the first leg of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s (SCO) annual summer tour, augers well for the concerts to come over the next few months.

THIS scintillating performance of well-known classics, on the first leg of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s annual summer tour, augers well for the concerts to come over the next few months.

LATER this week, the BBC SSO heads off on a six-day tour of the Netherlands and Belgium, under principal guest conductor Ilan Volkov. Last night’s concert was something of a warm-up, featuring one of the programmes the orchestra is taking with it.

SUCH is the historic musical tradition of a country like Russia, its orchestras can dine out exclusively on home produce. That’s been the theme of The Moscow State Symphony Orchestra’s current tour of the UK, including last night’s closing concert at the Perth Festival, performed under its musical director Pavel Kogan.

DVORAK’S Cello Concerto can be a beast of a work. Too much emphasis on the epic and it tends to don an uneasy arrogance. To much lingering on its sugary sentimentality and it goes limp at the knees.

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.