Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Royal Scottish Academy, Glasgow

Soaring, song-like lines

When she was a viola player, Sally Beamish frequently solicited the advice of the conductor and composer Oliver Knussen on her youthful compositions. Now her mentor has finally paid her the compliment of conducting one of her works, the world première of Sangsters – the centre-piece in an imaginatively devised programme presented by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra in the handsome concert hall of Glasgow's Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. It is Beamish's last commission for the Scottish and Swedish Chamber Orchestras with whom she and Karen Rehnqvist have enjoyed a fruitful exchange-residency. Sangsters, an accomplished addition to the still remarkably small repertoire of concertos for orchestra, draws its inspiration from a text by the Renfrewshire poet Betty McKellar. The subtle colour and emphasis of her song-like lines, with their images of laverocks (larks), selkies (seals) and "the plains o' Earth", along with the intricate tones of the pibroch and echoes of traditional Scottish and Swedish music inflect Beamish's music.

Messiaen-like, the composer faithfully notated the songs of skylarks and in the first movement her music soars mellifluously in the delicate shades and textures of the higher instruments, woodwind fluttering and chirruping, and the effect of brushes on timpani fancifully suggesting flapping wings or rushing air. From these ethereal heights the music darkens as lower-pitched instruments move into the foreground, plunging from skyline to seascape with a haunting cor anglais, a mournful cello, keening accompaniment and a beating threnody on timpani.

Exactly what cinematic sequence Schoenberg had in mind for his early Accompaniment to an Imaginary Film is unclear but his own headings "Threatening Danger", "Fear" and "Catastrophe" suggest something decidedly noirish. It afforded an uneasy panoramic sweep, seen all too clearly through Schoenberg's nightmare-tinged lens, under Knussen's acute direction; the musical camera panning in threateningly before abruptly cutting to another angle. Played twice, with an informed and urbane commentary by Knussen between the takes, it lost none of its edginess.

In his Scriabin Settings, dripping exquisitely with late-romantic yearning yet engagingly understated in their tasteful orchestral transcription, Knussen transformed five translucent piano miniatures (as Scriabin himself attempted elsewhere) "into something rich and strange". At the end of a programme brimming over with mystery and suggestiveness, Berg's elliptical Lyric Suite couldn't have been more appropriately placed. In the SCO's committed and eloquent performance every emotional nuance spoke volumes.