Every silver lining comes with a cloud attached. Yesterday, as a stoical RSNO management unveiled a glamorous new schedule of winter season concerts throughout Scotland, a cloud of uncertainty remained firmly over Edinburgh's Usher Hall.

As reported in The Herald last week, the RSNO has been forced to delay selling tickets for its forthcoming season of concerts in the capital because of problems at the construction and development programme at the Usher Hall. And it's worse than it looks.

The orchestra announced yesterday 22 top-line concerts due for performance between October and May at both the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall and the Usher Hall, featuring several major projects, a glittering array of top international solo artists and a hugely expensive performance of a large-scale dramatic cantata to be fronted by world-class singers.

Tickets for subscribers go on sale today, but in Edinburgh the orchestra is unable to sell a single seat for any show. Despite a cast-iron guarantee to the RSNO that, after a season out of the big hall and in the Edinburgh Festival Theatre, the Usher Hall would be ready, the foundations on which that guarantee was given have proved as unreliable as the foundations of the grand old hall itself.

Simon Woods, RSNO chief executive, is being pragmatic and as optimistic as possible. He has no option, though it is understood from within the organisation that he is "raging" at the predicament in which he finds himself, his orchestra and his loyal Edinburgh audience.

He has no idea when, or if, he might have access to the Usher Hall for his concerts. He has no idea what areas of the auditorium might be available and what seats he can sell. He has no idea under what circumstances he might find the hall when they do have access.

And it is absolutely beyond him how the hall, even if it is opened on a temporary basis to the orchestra, will operate a dual function as a public concert hall and a building site.

"We have a responsibility to the audience and the musicians to fully know what we're getting into before we start taking people's money. It's as simple as that.

"We are working towards the season, but we're missing some key bits of information about what shape the hall is going to be in."

If it was the Edinburgh festival, he said, they could stop the construction work for a month, clean up the hall, make it serviceable and use it as a temporary facility.

"For us, it's much more complicated. We use it week in, week out. They'd have to close down the building site, return it to the council's control, clean it up, let us in, then return it to a building site, week in, week out. We haven't yet understood all the nuances of that, for example the clearing up and preparing it for public use, with all the facilities.

"Obviously, I'm working with the assumption that the season will go ahead as planned, until it proves otherwise. But it's a complex building project where they have found structural issues, and there's a limit to how much you can accelerate a building project. It is what it is."

The new, full 22-concert season in Glasgow (and maybe Edinburgh) will be spearheaded by music director Stephane Deneve, the dominant presence in the orchestra, whose grip on the tiller grows ever stronger: he will take 12 of the 22 programmes himself, and has clearly determined the main artistic thrusts of the season.

These will include an immense performance of Berlioz's choral symphony-cantata The Damnation of Faust, fronted by American mezzo Jennifer Larmore, tenor Gregory Kunde, and bass Nicolas Cavallier, a cast that will cost a fortune ("a major investment"

as Simon Woods puts it, rather more dryly).

Deneve's initiatives also include a novel presentation entitled Springtime in Paris, a survey of French music of every hue, from cafe to salon, from concerto to Can Can.

The survey will be spread over two weeks and two long concerts, each in three parts, each with an early start, and each with two intervals. The best French keyboard players have been assembled for the mini-fest, including pianists Eric Le Sage and Frank Braley, as well as the greatest French pianist of all, Jean-Yves Thibaudet, who will be playing all night in the second concert, a salon-style affair with music including a new concerto, Ravel's evergreen concerto, and Thibaudet playing piano duets with Deneve. (The two are best friends, and the pianist was best man at Deneve's wedding last summer.) There will be a big sea theme in the new season, with music by Glazunov, Mendelssohn, Frank Bridge, Ravel, Debussy and Vaughan Williams (the Sea Symphony). There will be a tribute over several concerts to the 200th anniversary of Mendelssohn's birth, and Deneve will take two of the three Naked Classic concerts himself. He is passionately committed to that strand, now being cited explicitly by the management as the major strand for development in the RSNO.

All the regular RSNO titled conductors will be in the new season. Alexander Lazarev will do another Russian programme (with Borodin's fabulous Second Symphony); Walter Weller will conduct Mendelssohn and Haydn's Nelson Mass; and Neeme Jarvi - back again, and once again a regular - brings a classic Jarvi programme of his specialisms, including Sibelius's Violin Concerto and Prokofiev's Fifth Symphony.

Jarvi's dynamite son, Kristjan, a hugely popular figure with the musicians, also returns with a new commission from madcap Austrian composer Kurt Schwertsik, as well as Bruckner's Sixth Symphony.

The line-up of guest soloists for the new season is mouth-watering. Pianists include Steven Osborne (Brahms's second concerto), Paul Lewis (Beethoven's second), John Lill (Liszt's first), Stephen Hough (Mendelssohn's first), Piotr Anderszewski (Szymanowski's Sinfonia Concertante), Jean-Yves Thibaudet (Connesson's and Ravel's G major), and Leeds competition winner Sunwook Kim (Grieg's concerto).

Other soloists are no less glitzy, and include the great soprano Dame Felicity Lott, who will sing Poulenc's dramatic, heart-stopping monologue, La Voix Humaine, an opera about a telephone call.

Soprano Christine Goerke will sing Wagner in the same programme as Sir Thomas Allen sings Vaughan Williams; trumpeter Hakan Hardenberger will play Schwertsik; violinist Frank Peter Zimmermann (a real coup getting him) will play Beethoven's concerto in a stunning programme with Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra; Vadim Gluzman plays the Sibelius concerto, Rachael Barton-Pine Bruch's G minor, Alexandra Soumm Glazunov's, and the amazing Baiba Skride plays the Mendelssohn.

Deneve continues his ongoing symphonic cycles. With Mahler he reaches the Fifth Symphony, the season opener; with Roussel, having done the third, the fourth and, on disc, the second, next season he'll conduct the first of Roussel's four symphonies.

Not a lot of modern music in sight, though plenty meat on the bones of the season. On sale from today to subscribers, except in Edinburgh where they must wait, like the RSNO's chief executive, "with fingers crossed".