War, peace and poetry were the subjects of this Scottish Chamber Orchestra concert, which paired Vaughan Williams's Serenade to Music, one of the most beautiful of all Shakespeare settings, with Dona Nobis Pacem, his tremendous anti-war cantata, composed in 1936 to texts by Walt Whitman. The Serenade, given in its original version for 16 soloists and orchestra, was programmed as a showcase for an impressive group of young singers, many of them associated with the National Opera Studio. Dona Nobis Pacem formed a vehicle for the Edinburgh Festival Chorus, whose chorus master, David Jones, was also the concert's conductor.

Both works were given performances of tremendous grace and power. Jones steered the music away from connotations of English parochialism towards the European mainstream. The Serenade pulsed with a ravishing post-Wagnerian sensuousness. Dona Nobis Pacem, meanwhile, is frequently described as pre-empting Britten's War Requiem, composed 25 years later, though here one was also acutely conscious of Vaughan Williams's debts to the requiems of Verdi and Brahms, with its ricocheting brass writing, the angry nobility of its choral utterances and its sharply characterised deployment of soprano and baritone soloists.

The singing, for the most part, was exemplary, with the voices of the 16 soloists in the Serenade interweaving and interlocking like players in a gracious game. The Festival Chorus is on exceptional form at present - Jones has strengthened the tenor section, which used to be this choir's weak spot - and Dona Nobis Pacem bristled with power and dignity throughout. Claire Booth was the soprano soloist - occasionally tremulous and not always intense enough in her desperate prayers for peace. Baritone Gary Magee, however, was profoundly moving in his expressions of grief for a world "soiled" (Whitman's word) by the armies who march across its surface and by the politicians who deploy them.