Star Rating: *****

DONALD Runnicles didn't need to bring credentials to his first Glasgow concert on Thursday with the BBC SSO, of which he becomes chief conductor next year. But if anyone wanted to see them, they were all over his interpretations of James MacMillan's Third Symphony, entitled Silence and receiving its Scottish premiere, and Mahler's heart-stopping, six-movement song symphony, Das Lied von der Erde, for both of which Runnicles secured outstanding performances from the SSO.

His command of structure and space, and the flow of music within these, was deeply impressive in the MacMillan, a work that can seem bitty, but in Runnicles's hands traced an awesome unbroken arc from start to close. Within this shape, the haunting quality and atmosphere of the symphony was flawlessly sustained, while the inner detail of the music was precise and pristine, with fascinating, but not overstated, cross-referencing between oriental inflexions and, if you like, ethnic Scottish folk elements, which were revealed to be very close siblings. Beautiful, concentrated playing by the SSO.

Mahler's great Song of the Earth was out of this world, in several respects: for the power-driven heldentenor singing of Simon O'Neill, battering through Runnicles's explosively decisive and full-bodied accompaniment in the opening song; for the gloriously unbuttoned and drunken rustic elements; but above all - and heartbreakingly in the final song - for the sheer ache of mezzo Karen Cargill's long farewell, delivered with a tenderness that was shattering, and accompanied with infinite sensitivity and flexibility by Runnicles, a master of Mahlerian nuance, including the deliberate grotesquerie of the composer's scoring at the opening of Der Abschied.