Location: RSAMD, Glasgow Star rating: *** SUPERFICIALLY, the omens did not look good for the first official Summerfest concert yesterday at the RSAMD. Prizewinners' recitals can be vacuous affairs, full of fast notes and display rhetoric. On top of that, the repertoire chosen by the individual prizewinners yesterday amounted to a stylistic pot pourri, with music ranging from Bach to Dowland, a contemporary brass quintet, Scottish songs and some Debussy.

Location: RSAMD, Glasgow
Star rating: ***

SUPERFICIALLY, the omens did not look good for the first official Summerfest concert yesterday at the RSAMD. Prizewinners' recitals can be vacuous affairs, full of fast notes and display rhetoric. On top of that, the repertoire chosen by the individual prizewinners yesterday amounted to a stylistic pot pourri, with music ranging from Bach to Dowland, a contemporary brass quintet, Scottish songs and some Debussy.

Yet for some reason that defies logic or analysis, the compound gelled and a rather satisfying programme emerged.

At least half the pleasure in Tom Poulson's Bach Concerto performance was the silvery playing of a young man whose trumpeting has been a landscape feature of academy music in recent months. Moreover, with Scott Mitchell's ever-decisive pianism in accompaniment, they brought the music to life.

That, too, was the salient feature in soprano Claire Breen's witty, enchanting and characterful account of Francis George Scott's undeservedly neglected Scottish Songs; she brought the music vividly off the page.

Depth of character was the main feature of Fraser Langton's beguiling clarinet playing in Debussy's Premiere Rhapsody in a performance that captured the music's skittish volatility as much as its sheer sensuality.

The haunting moment of the concert was conjured by marimba player Calum Huggan in a bewitching account of John Dowland's Lachrimae Pavane, played with an expressive flexibility of which I did not think the marimba was capable. The key point, however, in this performance was that, despite the modern instrument, the music felt utterly Dowland, utterly authentic.

Rounding it all off, Pure Brass, the chamber music winners, gave a gripping account of Tom David Wilson's dark and strangely elegiac Superguy, a wholly atypical brass quintet.

The group has also just been selected for a two year residency project with chamber music promoting organisation Enterprise Music Scotland, following in the footsteps of the Alba String Quartet and Sax Ecosse. The quintet will receive specialist help and advice, culminating in a Scottish tour showcasing a newly commissioned work.