Today we're going to take a wee peek under the bonnet - or rather, I should say, under the lid - of something looming in Glasgow's music scene.

On Friday coming, the fifth Cottier Chamber Project throws open its doors to a festival of classical music concerts in the west end of the city. There will be dozens of concerts and goodness knows how many musicians involved. There will be players and chamber groups from every one of Scotland's national music companies. There will be soloists of every persuasion, with many familiar names and faces. And there will be the now-regular concert structures, from lunchtimes to early evenings, and from mid-evening events to a late-evening finale.

There will be many opportunities for bites at the Cottier cherry: the festival runs for three weeks. But one strand really caught my eye as as this year's CCP was unveiled: the lunchtime concert series. These concerts are free, they are short, usually under an hour, and are all at 1.10pm in the Hunterian Museum. Last year's unaccompanied Bach series became a bit of a cache, with the gallery packed and folk scrabbling to find a seat.

The instant Andy Saunders, French horn player and progenitor of the Cottier festival, announced that this year's lunchtime series would be a set of 10 lieder (song) recitals, given chronologically and running from Haydn, through all the greats, including Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann and Richard Strauss, to Britten and Berio (with his fabulous Folk Songs) I was bursting with a question. "You've got the repertoire, you've got the singers and you've got the pianists-accompanists. What are you going to do about a piano? What have you got? And what do you need?" Pianos, after all, don't grow on trees, though bits of them do.

"Pianos are a headache," admitted Saunders, in the course of a long explanation. Back in 2010, at the start of it all, the Cottier Project borrowed a Pleyel grand piano from the National Trust for Scotland. It had been housed in Hutchesons' Hall in town, which was closing down for renovation. The Pleyel was used in the first three festivals, and is still in Cottiers. Last year the piano stakes were upped when a west end resident and Cottier supporter loaned the CCP a good Grottrian-Steinweg grand piano. It will be in use again this year.

One of Saunders's early ambitions for this year's festival was to take advantage of the Hunterian's "amazing" piano collection. (I didn't know it had one.) It includes two Steinway model D grands, an Erard piano, a Broadwood piano, a Mozart-era fortepiano and a harpsichord. For a variety of reasons, that didn't quite work out, mostly logistical reasons connected with pianos having to be humphed up and down stairs sometimes daily. (The fortepiano will be used, by David McGuinness, in the opening recital on Monday June 8.)

Other options were then considered, including hiring a Steinway Model C, owned by Making Music and stored in Manchester. Then brainstorming by email-chain took place with featured pianists all pitching in: Steven Osborne, Alasdair Beatson, David McGuinness, Lynda Cochrane and (making a welcome CCP debut this year) Susan Tomes, formerly of Domus and the Florestan Trio, author of four books, broadcaster, much-respected international musician and thinker, now returned to live in her native Scotland.

And what's come out of it all is a schedule for pianos during this year's CCP: Cottier's Theatre will house the Steinway Model C (hired from Making Music) for all the concerts in Cottier's itself; the Hunterian Museum will house the Grottrian-Steinweg, again on loan, for all the lunchtime lieder recitals as well as the fortepiano for the opening recital. Erik Chisholm's opera, Simoon, being premiered in the Western Baths, also requires a piano; so the Pleyel piano will be moved into the Baths, then into Webster's Theatre for use in some productions there. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, some local residents and CCP supporters have pitched in with the offer of their homes and domestic pianos to host rehearsals, which will thus make available more pianos, including another Grottrian-Steinweg, another Erard and a Yamaha.

It is, said Saunders, "a tricky one". They'll need extra stage staff this year. And everything costs. The total cost, he says, for the Steinway hire, moving all three pianos between venues, piano tuning for 25 concerts, and the stage staff required, will come in at around £4,500, which actually doesn't, to an outsider, seem astronomical for what they're getting. But there is a shoe-string element to the budget; and all those musicians have to be paid. Still: what an enterprising venture from the CCP.

And it ain't over. At the last minute, as I write, Saunders has just recently learned that yet another keyboard instrument, a harmonium, is required for Chisholm's Simoon...