With – unusually – no visiting orchestra at this year’s St Magnus International Festival in far-flung Orkney (the fall-out from delayed funding confirmations, we’re assured), there was a danger that the annual midsummer event might have felt a little – well, quiet.

Lia Williams can be said to have been in her prime ever since the double-whammy several decades ago when she appeared onstage in fairly quick succession in Oleanna and then the original, and unsurpassable, production of Skylight.

Marking his departure as the Royal Scottish National Orchestra's Music Director after six years, Peter Oundjian definitely left on a high, conducting a gripping, visceral performance of Mahler’s last completed symphony. Its beginnings were glassy and clear, matched with a lyrical softness, before the orchestra erupted into powerful, passionate swells.

Before starting this review a decision was taken: that the over-used description of singer-songwriter Malcolm Middleton as a “Scottish miserablist” would not appear. However, this has proved impossible. Middleton is renowned, to the coterie who enjoy his music, for songs ripe with dejection but the first half of his set tonight is especially heavy with stark soul-searching.

Singing satirist Anna Russell placed the French chanson in her category of songs for singers "with no voice but tremendous artistry". Mezzo Karen Cargill has tremendous artistry but also a very great voice indeed, a mysterious gift which makes her one in a thousand, and also rather good French (put that down to Scotland's "Auld Alliance, perhaps).

There have been plenty of films about mountains, and they are mainly about men. The plot tends not to vary: man clambers up peak because, as Mallory famously reasoned, it is there. Whether factual or scripted, often they are disaster movies too: Everest, Touching the Void, the astonishing German film about the race to conquer the vertical wall of the Eiger, North Face.

Featuring two Russian composers, the two halves of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra’s programme could hardly have been more different. In the first, pianist Xiayin Wang (pictured below) joined the RSNO for Scriabin’s florid, rarely-heard Piano Concerto.

It’s as intricate as it is concise. The depth to the architecture of James MacMillan’s Saxophone Concerto – which was given its world premiere this week by saxophonist Amy Dickson and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra – is quite astounding, and all the more so for being packed into three five-minute movements.

The National Jazz Trio of Scotland are not really that at all. With a name designed to sound like a stiffly formal unit they are, in fact, an entity based around Bill Wells, a Scottish institution, albeit an alternative one. He’s been around the block many times since the Eighties when he first started making waves with his very personally curated and individual perspective on jazz. Since those days, he’s worked with all sorts, ranging from Isobel Campbell to Aidan Moffat to Future Pilot AKA. His fourth National Jazz Trio of Scotland outing is a likeable, laid back odd-pop curiosity.

Vol. IV is intended to be the first in a series of albums featuring one singer each. The voice fronting this one belongs to Kate Sugden whose sweet, unaffected tones match the disarmingly simple arrangements. The sound accompanying her borders on easy listening but undermined by a twinkling, plinky-plonky ambient aspect. Sometimes this is foregrounded, as on “Move”, a light and poised meditation on depression, or the revolving bass patterns of “Summer’s Edge”, redolent of modern classical sounds. On other occasions, Wells and his crew create a fuller sound.

The songs that blossom into grander affairs include the brief but catchy “Tinnitus Lullaby”, a strangely effective Spartan sea shanty about the medical condition of the title, the filmic organ-fuelled opener “Quick to Judge (Don’t Be So)”, and most strident of all, “A Quiet Life”, which explodes midway through into a New Orleans brass stomp, before retreating, by degrees, to cool funk and free jazz squawking. The latter is the album’s most fascinating piece, although possibly not its most accessible.

The National Jazz Trio of Scotland are unlikely to become a mainstream phenomenon but the furrow they’re currently ploughing is, in its own unique way, poppy and welcoming.

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Overleaf: Watch the video for "Tinnitus Lullaby" by National Jazz Trio of Scotland