"We'll aim to keep this as un-Christmassy as we can," warns leader Jonathan Morton, stage flanked by giant candelabras and bathed in Lynchian red light. The Scottish Ensemble's annual Concerts by Candlelight make a point of avoiding festive chintz, but usually opt for some kind of wintry effect; this year's Baltic theme should have made for rich musical pickings in that respect.

It was a shame that the lengthiest piece on the programme, effectively its centrepiece, was Peteris Vasks's Distant Light. The violin concerto begins well enough, swaths of cool stringy textures couched in Latvian folk harmonies prompting the usual images of melancholia and northernness. But its central passage is dismally maudlin, and Morton's solo playing, normally so seductive, was tediously overwrought in the three cadenzas.

The first half of the concert was given over to a six-part medley of music by new Baltic composers and old English ones; if Purcell and Byrd were intended as palette-cleansers, it was their slithering dissonances that (as so often) sounded the most daring of the lot. Played without breaks, the rest merged into one gothic landscape: Bronius Kutavičius's Northern Gates launched the set with four minutes of monolithic sound slabs, bowed heavy and garnished with the clunking of thick chains; Arvo Pärt made an obligatory appearance with Fratres, followed by the hearty roughness of Erkki-Sven Tüür, former leader of the Estonian prog-rock band In Spe, in two excerpts from his 1993 work Show.

The Scottish Ensemble delivered their trademark bolshy string sound in droves, fabulously full-blooded in the Purcell and Byrd. But their one-sound-fits-all approach starts to smother the character of what lies beneath, and leaves a lasting impression more about them than the music.