It has long been a goal of Celtic Connections, Glasgow's great winter festival of traditional music, to find a way of bringing together its rich heritage with what, for want of a better word, we call classical music.

This year, Ronald Stevenson, now in his 80th year and almost the forgotten man of Scottish music, has finally delivered a work worthy of the endeavour. Stevenson began work on Praise of Ben Dorain, inspired by the epic 18th-century poem of the same name by the Gaelic poet Duncan ban MacIntyre, in 1962, when his friend Hugh MacDiarmid showed him a translation he had made. Not many works can be said to be worth waiting 45 years for but this was certainly one of them.

It was a mistake of the organisers not to print the words in the programme. But it was about the only one in a BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra concert that featured a lively account of Matthew Arnold's Tam o'Shanter overture to kick off, and some other more traditional settings of MacIntyre's Gaelic poems, introduced by Mary Ann Kennedy, as a lead-in to the main event.

Stevenson uses a traditional musical form that any self-respecting piper would recognise: a simple ground returning with increasing levels of elaboration. He has the words sung in Gaelic and English by two separate choirs. Two child voices, a ninth apart, announce the theme. At the end, two adults return to the same theme in triumphant unison.

In between, there is rigorous compositional discipline to develop the material, and some of the most exhilarating choral writing I have heard for many a day, much of it unaccompanied. The big orchestral palette available is used selectively and only rarely brought together, the more effective when it is, as in the final, cathartic chords.

The singers of the Scottish Opera Chorus, the Edinburgh Singers and the Glasgow University chapel choir made a fine job of some demanding music. The young conductor and chorus-master James Grossmith seized his opportunity with both hands. Stevenson, a little stooped now, was there to take his own bow to the warmest of well-deserved applause.

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