at Bute Hall, Glasgow

The Rite of Spring at the Bute Hall? Maybe Stravinsky's pulsating scenes of pagan Russia seemed even less appropriate to Greyfriars Kirk the following night, but what mattered was that William Conway succeeded in holding together the two university chamber orchestras he had merged for the occasion and in leaping so many of the hurdles strewn in his path.

Though the double orchestra, with added brass and percussion, did not quite make up the large-scale forces the music demanded, the Bute Hall - despite the gothic exuberance of its architecture - was so impenetrable in its acoustics that the precise quantity of players was of no great consequence. Since the sound was never gong to be more than a distant approximation, the best thing to do was to sit back and enjoy the moments - quite a lot of them - that actually came off.

So although each crashing chord rising to the lofty ceiling was in danger of colliding with the previous chord coming back down, there were nevertheless some features - not least the opening high bassoon notes - that were quite startling in their vividness.

Martin Suckling's Mosaic proved an artful piece of fragmentary modernism and Susan Boyd, a promising product of the RSAMD's opera class, sang Elgar's Sea Pictures with notable sympathy. Though her bottom notes, in a work designed for the stentorian Dame Clara Butt when the Bute Hall was new, were almost inaudible in the surroundings, her top ones soared expressively in music so death-consciously Wagnerian yet chastely unoperatic.