Wagner and Brahms are supposedly antithetical. This is perhaps why the festival decided to schedule the first concert in Charles Mackerras's Scottish Brahms series against the final instalment of Scottish Opera's Ring, thus depriving some of us of the opportunity to hear both cycles in their entirety.

The second programme in the series consisted of the Second and Third Symphonies and the Second Piano Concerto. All three are in major keys, though they are far from being overtly optimistic. Mackerras's Brahms always seems shot through with danger, as if the music's emotions are threatening to batter through the constraints of form.

In the first movement of the Third Symphony, rhythmic dislocation leads to a fragmented quality that the lurching waltz of the development section fails to dissipate. In the slow movement of the Second, the elegiac central theme grows more painful with each repetition, its colours increasingly bleached as it passes from opulent strings to isolated woodwind.

The Second Piano Concerto is uncommonly turbulent, its mood at times close to the storms of the First. The soloist is the cultish Christian Zacharias, who hurtles from calm to violence within seconds in the first movement, and is jagged and fierce in the Scherzo, the whole performance only attaining emotional poise towards its end.

Though the Scottish Chamber Orchestra uses modern instruments, Mackerras recreates the forces deployed at each of the respective premieres, revealing a brass-driven orchestral palette that is pungent in its beauty.