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IT was the concert that opened with a warm caress, closed with a bracing and explosive firecracker, included a flavour of the revolution, and bundled in something innocuous that resembled a bit of a filler.

If any orchestra can confidently dispense with a conductor and use a trusted leader-director, then it is the SCO, which, with its former leader and frequent guest leader, violinist Alexander Janiczek, produced playing on Friday night, on all scales, that was a testament to the expertise, experience and international reputation of this orchestra, which still feels young (I remember when it wasn't there at all), but is in fact approaching the grand age of 40.

SCO players might be the first to admit that the lush textures of late Richard Strauss are not the usual furrow they plough, but the string sextet from Strauss's last opera, Capriccio, was played by the front-desk musicians with all the idiomatic and quintessential Romantic colours, flavours and accents required to stamp their performance with authenticity.

Similarly with Anton Webern's minutely-distilled, exquisitely-concentrated Five Movements for string orchestra. To this day, many composers (including Kurtag) try to concentrate a world of expression into as few notes as possible. The SCO's mesmerising performance demonstrated that Webern not only did it first, but more effectively than anyone since.

The concluding performance of Beethoven's Second Symphony was a blazing, bristling experience in the hands of this majestic outfit, though I'm afraid that not even their performance of Haydn's Sinfonia Concertante, with all its multiple solos and musical interfaces, persuaded me that it's not much more than a Friday afternoon, ramshackle, cobbling together of bits and pieces.