SCO 26/27: Barber's Adagio & Violin Concerto

The Scottish Chamber Orchestra are at City Halls on Friday 30 October, with Ryan Bancroft conducting and violinist Clara-Jumi Kang taking the solo. It's a night built around two of Samuel Barber's most powerful works: the Violin Concerto and the Adagio. The Adagio is the one you'll recognise from films like Platoon and The Elephant Man, and here it sits alongside the concerto, both with Kang on the solo part.

Those two are flanked by a couple of other names. The evening opens with Schulhoff's Suite for Chamber Orchestra, and closes with Kurt Weill's Symphony No. 2, which the SCO describe as darkly brilliant. It's a programme that moves from the lighter, more playful Schulhoff through Barber's emotional weight and ends on Weill's starker, more unsettling symphony.

The SCO is one of Scotland's five National Performing Companies, and they've been a fixture of the country's music scene since they were founded in 1974. They're funded by the Scottish Government, the City of Edinburgh Council, and a community of philanthropic supporters, and they've built an international reputation for performances that range from mainstream classical repertoire to newly commissioned works and cross-art form collaborations. Sub-Principal Clarinet William Stafford puts it simply: what really drives the orchestra to play is seeing the expression on people's faces and watching them light up.

City Halls is Glasgow's oldest purpose-built performance space, dating back to 1841, and it's renowned for some of the finest acoustics in the world; its shoebox Grand Hall now sits at the heart of the city's Centre for Music. The concert starts at 7:30pm, and tickets are £42.50, £36.50, £31.50, £24.50, and £16.50, with a restoration fund of up to £1.50 added at checkout.