Star rating: ***

To be frank, there is usually little to be said about Glasgow's annual Hogmanay Gala Concert, part of impresario Raymond Gubbay's Christmas Festival. It's a formulaic delivery of numbers approximately classical and overtly populist, with a hefty dose of the wha's like us philosophy.

This year, with the RSNO playing (though in its low-calorie, bass-light format), and Simon Wright (who appears at least to know which way is up with a baton) conducting, there were several striking differences.

As well as the regular classical fare, the first half included, extraordinarily, the finale of Haydn's Farewell Symphony, where the players, historically over a pay dispute, gradually down tools and quit the stage. The joke would have been wittier if the compere, River City's Joyce Falconer, had been asked to fill in the background.

The potential problem, however, was that the Farewell was followed by Ravel's Bolero, which needs the full band and is based on a repeated tune and rhythm with gradual orchestral accumulation. So whoever organised it simply inverted the Farewell formula and the players came back on gradually throughout the Ravel. It worked stunningly well, visually, musically and theatrically, with some nonsense, of course, from the returning players.

But the great musical strength of the show came from The New Tradition, a trio of young RSAMD pipers who demonstrated incontrovertibly that the pipes can play in time, in tune and in sympathy with a symphony orchestra (to say nothing of the massed chorus of a capacity audience) and can secure real emotional depth from music, as they did in a heartrending account of Phil Cunningham's Cathcart, which transcended all musical boundaries and divisions.