Now bedding back into the Usher Hall after a prolonged absence for an extensive, and still apparently incomplete, refurbishment, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra continue to play fruitfully around the mainstream with a noticeably ramped-up selection of soloists this season. On Friday it was the turn of the excellent Leif Ove Andsnes.

Written in America, Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No 4 received a somewhat cutting reception on its premiere in 1926, although time, revisions and re-revisions have ensured its place in the canon. Andsnes is a cool but dazzling Rachmaninov exponent, here giving the first in a series of performances that marks the climax of his insightful Rachmaninov cycle. This intricate performance tinged Rachmaninov’s nostalgia with a wonderfully unsentimental air. Clean and emotionally understated, Andsnes’s glittering, lucid piano wove in and out of the orchestra with cut-glass precision and depth, a running commentary with near-Hitchcockian overtones. It might not have pleased diehard Romantics, but then, neither, really, does Rachmaninov’s experimental Fourth.

The other fascinating “flop” of the night was Dutilleux’s First Symphony. Written in the 1950s,full of unfashionable mystical jazz inflections that affronted a French musical scene besotted with serialism, the work was first tried by RSNO at the St Magnus Festival in May. Since then, they have become razor-sharp, the fiendish lines cleaner and tauter, strings and wind glittering, furies sparking about in the otherworldly firmament of Dutilleux’s rather formal free-form symphony. The climax is still rather unsatisfying, but you couldn’t fault the intent.

Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite rounded off matters. There was still the occasional flatness that had reared its head throughout the night, and the Infernal Dance was perhaps not quite infernal enough under the conductor Stéphane Denève’s controlled power. But if occasionally the sound could be more voluptuous, the finale was pregnant with barely reined-in electrifying aggression.

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