The New-Zealand-born composer Lyell Cresswell has lived in Edinburgh since the early 1980s and has written regularly for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. His latest piece for them, a triple concerto premiered here with the Swiss Piano Trio as soloists, is crafted with flattering familiarity, as if for old friends; its clean, balanced textures perfectly suit the SCO. The concerto is organised into eight short interlocking movements with names such as "Giocoso-tranquillo", "… quasi una sicilina …" and "Calmo", and the trio function like a highlighted strand of the orchestral fabric. Their sharp punches leave hazy afterthoughts in the strings, their furious pizzicatos melt into hushed tutti versions. Many moments sounded striking in isolation, but the fragmented form didn't quite hang together on first hearing. Dissonant outbursts had shock value but didn't fit a bigger picture. This might have been partly down to the soloists, who needed to lead with more conviction.
What Cresswell captures so well, though, is the SCO's innate elegance. And that's what the Swiss conductor Baldur Brönnimann brought out in the rest of the programme, too. Hans Zender's orchestrations of five Debussy piano preludes are poised, alert and deliberately eccentric – at one point the principal horn and trumpet players trade French insults across the stage – and sounded uncannily beautiful here. Takemitsu's How Slow the Wind, written for the SCO in 1991, is a sumptuous miniature full of Debussy-esque wisps and sighs, all finely shaped.
The concert ended with a performance of Ravel's Mother Goose suite that was direct, carefully detailed and generally mellow. Brönnimann illustrated the fairytales in cool black-and-white rather than gaudy Technicolor; some corners could have been more malleable, some climaxes could have lifted more, but the SCO make a vast sound when they want to, and the finale was majestic.
