While a capacity crowd packed the Glasgow concert hall to see local teenage violin sensation Nicola Benedetti play in a charity concert, down the road only a handful turned up at the City Halls to hear the world's most famous viola player performing with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. The competition was certainly unenviable, but Yuri Bashmet's programme was probably equally responsible for deterring the less adventurous.

In truth, there was nothing radical about a programme that brought together two established 20th-century greats with Schubert and an also-ran contemporary of Mozart. More questionable was the running order, which paired Britten with Shostakovich and Hoffmeister with Schubert - not so much two halves as two separate entities.

Britten was only a teenager when he composed the Two Portraits for String Orchestra, but the work is more than juvenilia, the first lively and surprisingly chromatic, the second a lyrical self-portrait with solo viola, Britten's own instrument. Shostakovich's Thirteenth Quartet, arranged for strings and viola, was gloomy stuff in comparison, particularly given Bashmet's dirge-like tempo in the outer sections. Despite the prominent viola part, this is absolutely an ensemble piece.

Bashmet's only truly solo performance was of Hoffmeister's D major Viola Concerto, and here his playing was not always clean, though his ability to make the instrument sing is second to none. Interpolating the finale theme from Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante in the first-movement cadenza was a little in-joke that put the piece firmly in its historical context.

Though some superfluous hand-waving in the Britten suggested Bashmet was no conductor, Schubert's Third Symphony turned out to be the concert's high point: a delicately shaped performance from the SCO - full of transparent textures that fairly fizzed along.