It is temping to wonder what path the Orielles would have gone down in a world where the coronavirus never occurred. The Halifax trio had just released their second album, Disco Volador when the pandemic struck, and wiped out any hope of touring the record. Instead they reworked material from the record for use scoring a film, and have now returned with last year’s Tableau album as a significantly different beast.

Blake Rose clearly wasn’t leaving anything to chance. The support act bounded onstage draped in a Saltire, and soon brought up his days growing up in Aberdeen before moving to Australia. That Scottish upbringing helped inspire one of his songs, “Sweet Caledonia”, and going by the lively reaction he received from the youthful Glasgow crowd they were glad to take him as their own.

When your special guest is a young soprano with all the world before her, the total artist already, your programme might seem to run itself. Yet the Dunedin Consort’s sequence seen and heard in Glasgow, Edinburgh and (last night) London followed a proper musical logic, running together an overture, a ballet and a cantata in the first half, and pulling focus on Handel’s early years in Rome, all supremely inventive music – though the later G minor Concerto Grosso which launched the second half is in a class of its own.

Jessica Winter is clearly a hardy soul. The Portsmouth singer made a point of shedding her jacket and top as her support set went on, a bold choice given the typically unpredictable Glasgow weather was serving up freezing snow outside at the time.

This evening brought to mind those marathon 19th century concerts when Beethoven would unleash a handful of new symphonies and a couple of piano concertos on an unsuspecting public.

Although We Are Scientists onstage chat is always delivered with a light touch, there is truth running through it as well. Early on at this set their singer and guitarist Keith Murray quipped that he wouldn’t be needing his lucky charm for the evening, and in a way he was right.

There is an endearing awkwardness with Dry Cleaning, despite steady success over the past three years. “Does anyone else want a wave?” asked their frontwoman Florence Shaw at one point, almost shyly, before proceeding to do just that in various directions.

It was an intriguing contrast, between a group who seemed slightly taken aback by the size of venue they were playing, and the manner in which they emphatically delivered their material in that setting during this gig.

You’d hardly call a director particularly perceptive for highlighting Lady Macbeth as the true power behind the throne, scheming and cajoling her husband’s bloody ascent to the crown. In her audacious, provocative and thoroughly compelling Macbeth (an undoing), however, writer/director Zinnie Harris goes much, much further – so far, in fact, that a couple of her characters seem confused as to whether Lady Macbeth is herself the King.

In full force again for 2023, Scotland’s premier folk music festival Celtic Connections is back with its signature strand of blending and sharing musical traditions. On Saturday, emerging Scottish folk cellist Juliette Lemoine gave a superb early evening recital in Glasgow City Hall’s intimate recital room for what was the official launch of her debut album Soaring.

I’m struck by how many of my 2022 picks deal with relationships in extremis: a love story disguised as a Hitchcockian murder mystery, a long friendship gone suddenly surreally awry, an unlikely romance that unfolds on a sub-zero train journey, a married couple whose shared obsession with mortality is piqued by a toxic dust cloud, a father-daughter bond that’s finally understood through the prism of bitter-sweet memory.