So faintly marked, so microscopic: the notes in the score to Jonathan Harvey’s recent orchestral piece . . . towards a pure land hang on the page like dying ants. Following the score as the music progressed in the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra’s Wednesday Prom was impossible.

But then, who would want their concentration compromised during any work by this senior British composer? Where some other seekers after spiritual uplift reduce their compositional tools to nursery toys, Harvey never shirks complexity. Yet his music still makes a profound impact.

The world in this 16-minute BBCSSO commission couldn’t be more alluring. “A Pure Land,” Harvey tells us, “is a state of mind beyond suffering, where there is no grasping.” No grasping but lots of string players — hovering, scuttling, rotating their tone between the full monty, ghostly shiverings and the empty noise of bow on bridge.

Add to this woodwinds chattering like Messiaen’s birds, striding brass chorales and an extraordinarily refined web of cracklings, pops, thuds and whispers from the hard-worked percussion. Plus, unfortunately, some audience coughs. Yet as Harvey’s motifs and moods rose, fell, quickened or calmed, tension remained high. Ilan Volkov and his players obviously cherished its Buddhist visions and beauties. So did I.

After Harvey’s continent of bliss, Mozartland. No suffering here, either. Stephen Kovacevich was at the top of his form, pitching the Piano Concerto No 25 at the correct weight: light enough to wear a smile and be crystalline in flight, solid enough to convey the calm of a composer on the Olympian heights.

Final stop, the Rhineland, as presented in Schumann’s Third Symphony. No Schumann symphony could be called effortless, but Volkov’s troops easily located its strengths, helped by the orchestra’s five refulgent horns: pure gold at every appearance.