Star rating: ****

SHE said Baroque; she meant Baroque; and Sally Beamish's new Chamber Concerto, premiered on Friday by the Rascher Saxophone Quartet with the SCO conducted by Garry Walker, did derive its structure, exuberance and sheer vitality from the music of the Baroque period, particularly from Bach's Brandenburg Concertos.

You could hear that everywhere in the music, from its lucid structures to its momentum, bristling with the motoric elements that give Baroque music its exhilarating drive and energy.

At the same time, the three-movement concerto, stunningly played by the versatile Rascher Quartet, was authentic Beamish: there was not a note that could have been so penned by another composer. Yet there was a fundamental difference between this concerto and the other dozen or so in the genre by Sally Beamish: its directness and accessibility.

This piece will go everywhere.

It is the quintessential concerto for Everyman. The sizzling playing of the Raschers, with the SCO and Walker at their most athletic, brought the piece bounding off the page and into anybody's orbit. The phenomenal interplay between saxes and orchestra, within the quartet itself and with significant contributions from orchestral soloists joining the party, gave the fast outer movements a sparkling spontaneity.

The beguiling slow movement, massively influenced by Scottish music, with a touch of heterophony in the writing, wove a haunting tapestry of atmospheric sound.

The concerto was the perfect complement to Thomas Wilson's serious and deeply impressive Fifth Symphony, with its long, soulful woodwind themes garlanding Wilson's pungent rhythmic writing, and its poignant, valedictory conclusion coherently and sensitively presented by the SCO and Garry Walker.

Stravinsky's Dumbarton Oaks was a spicy aperitif, while Gruber's fun Manhattan Broadcasts was a piece in the wrong place at the