Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Glasgow City Halls, review ROBIN Ticciati, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra's principal conductor, is a self-confessed obsessive. When he hits on an enthusiasm, he likes to explore it from top to bottom. Right now, his particular passion is Berlioz. This concert began with the Love Scene from the greatest of his symphonies, the one based on Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. It's an astonishing movement, which seems to discover its own form as it unfolds - just as the young lovers discover the depths of their feelings in the act of uttering them. Ticciati and the orchestra caught that sense of burgeoning emotion beautifully. The smaller forces of a chamber orchestra gave a very different feeling to the dusky low string sounds, which expressed the intimacy of the nocturnal setting. The same was true of the cellos" impersonation of Romeo's impetuous declarations. They felt like a personal avowal. It was both delicate and impassioned. The second piece on the programme - Beethoven's First Piano Concerto - had a similar quality. Or to be more exact, the orchestra had a similar quality; but pianist Lars Vogt had a different conception of the piece, only intermittently corresponding with Ticciati's reading. Vogt focused more on the piece's martial insistence and gruff humour. One felt a mismatch between the heavy-handed sounds emanating from that big black piano and the delicate sounds around it. In the first movement, Vogt chose the longest of Beethoven's three surviving cadenzas. One could see why it's rarely played. It unbalances the movement, and ends with a joke that's too broad to be funny; or perhaps it was how Vogt underlined the punchline that spoiled it. With Brahms's early Serenade No 1, we were back in a Romantic ambience, except that it was daylight, and the music was sunny and tranquil. Again Ticciati showed his gift for unlocking a piece's expressive territory, by giving the first sounds a special colour. Having ushered us in to Brahms's world, he and the players revealed all its emotional regions: shadowy and melancholy in the first Scherzo, radiant in the Adagio, rumbustious in the Finale. It was like wandering around a gallery of paintings by a great Romantic artist: all different, but all limned in the same veiled, golden tone.