The most fitting tribute

One of the SCO's anticipated high points was to be the November premiere of the Edinburgh-based composer's Third Symphony – Homage to Robert Burns, commissioned with funding from the Scottish Government as part of this year's Homecoming. However, at the time of Harper's death on Easter Sunday, he had all but completed the first movement, with a second left only as sketches, and these will require some reconstruction to make a performance possible.

Yesterday, the composer's wife Louise expressed her wish that at least some of the work might still be performed. "He told me he had finished the first movement, which is 14 minutes long, but sketchy in places," she explains. It takes its text from Burns's Ye banks and braes, while the second movement centres on Burns's meeting with Sir Walter Scott in Edinburgh, expressed as a setting of words by Harper's close friend, Edinburgh author Ron Butlin.

Even the first movement would require some final preparation, which Louise Harper believes might best be undertaken by another close friend, composer Lyell Cresswell. "It may be possible for Lyell to reconstruct the second movement from Edward's sketches," she says. In which case, would SCO managing director Roy McEwan give serious thought to his orchestra giving an "unfinished" premiere, coupled perhaps with one of Harper's existing works? Watch this space.

Such a solution would certainly be the most fitting and potent tribute to a man held in enormous respect by Scotland's musical community, especially as his new symphony, conducted by Gary Walker, was to be programmed alongside music by Harper's late Edinburgh University colleague Kenneth Leighton, and by one of his former university students, James MacMillan. The biggest tragedy is that the completed work would have crowned magnificently a career that, in recent years, has displayed an astonishing Indian summer of creativity in the face of intense personal adversity. Harper was never one to admit defeat, even paying for regular private medical treatment in Vienna when the NHS had all but written him off. And that is reflected in an extraordinary flowering of late composition, which a couple of years ago included the (initially incomplete) premiere of his Symphony No 2 by the SCO, followed by the orchestra's excellent recording of the completed version on Edinburgh's Delphian label.

Delphian's founder and managing director Paul Baxter (another of the composer's former university students), who encouraged the completion of the second symphony, was genuinely shocked to learn that Harper had even considered a third symphony. "This is remarkable, given how ill he was, but not surprising," says Baxter.

"It's something of a tragedy that, when faced with an ultimatum, Edward displayed so much energy and drive so late in his career."

And that's the astonishing part of the Harper story. Like so many composers showing talent at an early age – the 1970s chamber opera Fanny Robin and the much-performed Intrada after Monteverdi for orchestra written for the 1982 Edinburgh Festival – the need to earn a living as a university lecturer (and equally notably, as the pianist/ director of his own excellent ground-breaking ensemble, the New Music Group of Scotland, during the 1970s and '80s) rather stifled his compositional output, yet still he found occasional major creative outlets in such projects as his 1985 full-length opera Hedda Gabler for Scottish Opera.

Sadly, even a partial premiere of his Third Symphony will have to be a posthumous one. But if the creative vitality of Harper's "late flowering" is repeated in this music, it will not be a doleful one. Its basis in Burns, its original large-scale concept for chorus and orchestra, and the prospect of such stellar soloists as mezzo soprano Jane Irwin, rather suggests this would have been a work of considerable spectacle, ecstasy and exhilaration.

If Harper's death skews the emphasis of today's SCO season announcement, it should not detract from an otherwise sparkling array of concerts, the bulk as usual taking place in Edinburgh and Glasgow.

The first thing to note is a return, where appropriate, to the Usher Hall within the Edinburgh season. Conductor Louis Langre and Scots soprano Lisa Milne are part of the season opener there, in a programme of "unfinished masterpieces" that include Mozart's Mass in C and (predictably) Schubert's Unfinished Symphony.

There are six other dates in the Usher Hall, most notably the official debut of young British firebrand and Simon Rattle protg, Robin Ticciati as the SCO's new principal conductor. He is joined by Rattle's wife, Czech mezzo soprano Magdalena Kozen, in a superb combination of Henze's Chamber Symphony, Mahler's Des Knaben Wunderhorn songs and Brahms's Symphony No 2.

When his appointment was announced earlier this season, Ticciati hinted at a programming style heavily influenced by Rattle, where "I've come to realise how exciting it is to lead an audience through an evening, and how important it is to tell them a story". He talked of "the intellectual challenge" of putting a Haydn symphony with Ligeti's Piano Concerto, a concept mirrored in December's debut programme, and in Ticciati's other four programmes next season, one of which does feature the Ligeti concerto.

Other regular conductors include Sir Charles Mackerras, Olari Elts (in the world premiere of fellow Estonian Erkki-Sven Tr's Symphony No 8), Joseph Swensen with violinist Henning Kraggerud in Sibelius's Violin Concerto, and more of the explosive chemistry between pianist/director Christian Zacharias and the SCO in an all-Schubert programme. Baroque specialist Richard Egarr makes a welcome return conducting Bach and Handel in March.

As ever, new music has a prominent place in the orchestra's programming. A 75th birthday tribute to the SCO's long-standing composer laureate Sir Peter Maxwell Davies in October, sees Oliver Knussen conduct the Symphony No 4 alongside Knussen's own Music for a Puppet Court (written as a 60th birthday tribute to Max) and Mahler's Rckert Lieder.

In every sense – including soloists of the calibre of pianists Paul Lewis and Steven Osborne – this is another vintage season from the SCO, enhanced by the continuation of its vastly popular teatime CL@SIX series in Edinburgh's St Cuthbert's Church, and a challenging Masterworks educational programme.

But for now, such endless delights are overshadowed by the sad news of Harper's death. A posthumous premiere of his symphony, should it prove possible even in its unfinished state, would ultimately lift the mood to one of immense celebration.

Details of the SCO's 2009-10 season are on www.sco.org.uk