They may have filled the auditorium - built six years ago as an opera house for the Aix festival, with screens and overhead panels converting it into a very fine concert hall - but many of the French music fans are not in the best of health.

So the problem during the dynamic contrasts of Olivier Messiaen's Les offrandes oubliees is not that Scotland's national orchestra has boldly elected to open with an offering of coals to Newcastle, but that the consumptives in the crowd are a little disruptive. That the band kept its shape, to use a sporting analogy, was a notable triumph.

Thereafter the coughing subsided and the concert's trajectory was ever upwards. I was unsure of some of the pacing of Beethoven's Emperor Concerto - more down to pianist Nikolai Lugansky than conductor Peter Oundjian - but there was no doubting the quality of the soloist's playing, the beauty of the orchestra's accompaniment on the Adagio second movement, or the elegant structure of the finale.

It was the orchestra's performance of Rachmaninov's Symphonic Dances after the interval, however, that really ignited French passions. The rich melodic writing is married to wonderful orchestration that gives a big band a wonderful showcase, and the RSNO rose to the occasion, with the winds in particular taking the opportunity to shine.

Leader Maya Iwabuchi's own lovely solo passage put the gloss on some muscular string playing and the rhythmic coherence across all the sections in the build-up to the conclusion was absolutely world class. With a further Hungarian Dance from Brahms and the tour favourite of Eightsome Reels as encores, the French audience were not only impressed, but possibly even restored.