When the SCO performed Music for Strings, Percussion and Celeste with Sir Charles Mackerras a couple of years ago, the Queen's Hall was packed out. With Joseph Swensen conducting this weekend, the hall was barely half full. The absence of the orchestra's hugely popular conductor laureate was doubtless a contributing factor (though the presence of former principal conductor Swensen was surely some compensation), but the real issue here was one of programming. Where Mackerras presented Bartok's masterpiece alongside Dvorak, for Swensen it was the climax of a 20th-century programme - clearly a serious deterrent for Edinburgh concert-goers.

Still, this was an interesting programme in which all roads led back to Bartok, highlighting his influence at every turn. Even the new work on the programme, Cinnamon Street by British composer Joe Cutler, fitted into this scheme, not only in terms of its inspiration, the works of Polish-Jewish writer Bruno Schultz, but also in the way in which its percussive energy was shot through with lyrical moments.

Cutler was followed by Ligeti's youthful Romanian Concerto, an exuberant Bartok homage, and Lutoslawski's Chain II, one of the most enduring concerto-type violin works to have been written in recent decades. Here it was given an intense, lyrical performance by Isabelle van Keulen and the SCO, which showed its affinities with Bartok, from the slidings and shadings of orchestral sonority in the rhapsodic ad libitum sections to the particular energy generated in the rhythm-driven a battuta movements. But there was an uncharacteristically subdued feel to Swensen's usually energetic conducting style - something that became an issue in Music for Strings Percussion and Celeste, where the slow movements were too prosaic to be mysterious, the fast not energetic enough to be truly explosive.