The current collection of NDT2 dancers are in full bloom

NDT2, FESTIVAL THEATRE, EDINBURGH EVERY time NDT2 (Netherlands Dance Theatre2) hits our stages, the usual superlatives fall flat in speechless admiration at 16 dancers – age 17 to 23 – who can handle anything the world’s top-ranking choreographers care to task them with. For this programme that meant works by Lightfootleon, Jiri Kylian and Alexandfer Ekman and a demanding shift of moods, humours and movement vocabularies.

Company policy at NDT2 means that, after three years, even the most covetable talent has to move on. It’s a dictat that makes the ensemble prowess on-stage even more remarkable, not least in Ekman’s closing tour de force, Cacti. A drolly deadpan voiceover spoofs various aesthetic theories that reference dance and ritual. Cue the massed ranks of uniformly clad dancers, each poised on a white plinth, who deliver synchronous formations, complete with orchestrated slaps and stomps, before fragmenting into solo motifs that lead to the hilarious arrival of the cacti. Seriously clever, delightfully bizarre and surprisingly funny, it showcases the dancers’ discipline, panache and stamina – following on from the dark angst and wrenching drama of Kylian’s Gods and Dogs, where humankind seems menaced by the beast within and the hound-like forces of fate.

Lightfootleon’s opening piece Studio2, with its upstage incline and overhead mirror, hinted at the dancer’s daily confrontation with their own reflected self while the exits and entrances exquisitely echoed the transience that is ours, as well as theirs. century romp. In Jackson’s world, Figaro is a thrusting young banker in partnership with his on the make squeeze, Suzanne. Together they’re about to merge with a top-floor firm that will make them the biggest financial institution in Scotland. To get there, the young lovers must negotiate their way around a series of compromising positions involving an even more lascivious power couple, predatory PA Margery, a cross-dressing Ukrainian office boytoy and an overdose of Glass Ceiling perfume by Jackie Collins.

Thatcher’s children are alive and kicking in Mark Thomson’s production, which, while peppered with a series of trademark spiky one-liners by Jackson, also shows a new-found maturity from a writer who seems to have moved on from adolescent fumbling. If the tubthumping anti-capitalist polemic at the end states the obvious, it feels very much of the moment.

In the main, Jackson’s script allows Thomson’s cast to explore the full grotesquerie of how money talks. While Mark Prendergast and Nicola Roy make a handsome couple, Molly Innes’s Margery and Jamie Quinn’s Pavlo provide much of the play’s comic drive. It’s Stuart Bowman’s explosive Sir Randy who provides the play’s amoral compass, his mixture of self-important pomp and unintentional ridiculousness falling somewhere between Fred Goodwin and Charles Endall Esquire, bankrupt on every level in a comedy of considerable power. SSO in stupendous form: the revelation of a completely familiar musical object was shocking.

It was the climax of a wonderful programme that heatured the premiere of Detlev Glanert’s brilliant Brahms-fantasie, a homage laced with the DNA of Brahms, but very much its own man, the dark, rich Alto Rhapsody with Sarah Connolly’s gorgrous, chocolatey mezzo in perfect balance with the super-subtle male voices of Christopher Bell’s Edinburgh Festival Chorus, and the immaculately gauged playfulness of Schumann’s Fourth Symphony which, in its original version, sang and lilted its way off the page.

A great night to be a music lover and to be alive to witness this magic from Runnicles and his orchestra.

SCO, CITY HALLS, GLASGOW OH dear. The SCO is usually astute in its programming. On Friday the melange of music it dumped on its Glasgow audience was a mess, with no real interconnections, little logic, no impressive coherence and absolutely no trajectory. Beethoven Five was there because it’s off on a wee tour. Berlioz’s Reverie and Caprice is, presumably, one of the pieces heading into the recording studios on the orchestra’s return from Spain; Schumann’s Faust Overture, as much as I adore the composer, is middle-drawer and was making up the numbers.

And, as brilliant, witty and characterful as Alexander Janiczek’s zestful performance of Gruber’s Nebelsteinmusik was, it’s just not much of a piece. Mince, as I have observed before, however well-prepared and well-served, will always be mince.

But the shock of the night, and I acknowledge from the reaction that this will be a severe minority opinion, was Robin Ticciati’s interpretation of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. The team had clearly put a lot of work into it, and the SCO played a blinder. Ticciati’s pacing was considered, and his detailing was phenomenal. Balance was good and all the emphases were in the right places. It was sophisticated and articulate.

It forgot one thing: the visceral, pummelling nature of the music, its sheer, bloody-minded obssessiveness with drive and momentum and its quintessential head-banging character. It did nothing for me. Mackerras would have groaned. RSNO, GLASGOW ROYAL CONCERT HALL THESE are an emotional four stars. Space is tight, so I’m going to give a brief response to the concert which featured the great Canadian bassbaritone Gerald Finley in a performance of Peter Lieberson’s Songs of Love and Sorrow; and, with Finley again, soprano Ida Falk Winland and the RSNO Chorus, all conducted by the impressive Dutchman Lawrence Renes making his RSNO debut, a moving performance of Brahms’s German Requiem.

Can human tragedy, irony, heartwarming sympathy and yet further tragedy all occupy the same space? Yes they can, and did, in a story about the composer Peter Lieberson, who wrote a memorial to his late wife, a famous singer, then, on writing a second piece, contracted the same illness and died last year.

Gerald Finley, in a powerfully controlled yet emotional performance of that second set of Lieberson songs, cut to the heart of the music, which pulsed with love, ache and loss. Deeply Romantic and profoundly emotional music. As is Brahms’s great German Requiem, which received a musical performance from soloists and chorus.

It is a fact the RSNO Chorus never sounds particularly good in the Royal Concert Hall, which doesn’t have a choral acoustic: you have to hear beyond the actual sound, which is tough. Within that limitation, and a shortage of tenors, they did a good job. BANG ON A CAN, LONDON SINFONIETTA, GLASGOW ROYAL CONCERT HALL THE first packed evening of this weekend’s exploration of the broad church assembled under the banner of minimalism was notable for the volume of music it, paradoxically, embraced. Sheer volume was part of the attraction of the opening brace of compositions from Louis Andriessen, in performances as enthusiastically acclaimed by the composer as by everyone else. Hoketus, here played by two sparring sextets with alto saxophones, is a playful response to the genre, all building pulses, fiendishly demanding and eventually funky as all get out. Work- ers Union was a clever choice to partner it, pianist Vicky Chow’s twin-fisted piano playing emblematic of its rhythm-over-pitch aesthetic.

That was just a prelude to the gentler sounds of the main programme in which the two groups alternated on works by Andriessen, Steve Reich and Gavin Bryars. Life, written for Bang on a Can and played with its film, shows a contrasting gentler side of the Dutchman. The double string quartet and winds of Reich’s Eight Lines illustrated how he and Glass diverged rhythmically while still sharing a tonal palette, and 2x5 made an interesting comparison with Hoketus, although much more akin to prog rock (particularly King Crimson’s Red album).

Bryars’s Jesus Blood seemed conservative, although the simple theatre of the orchestration is a delight and it set the scene for a coda which followed Andriessen’s response to Allegri’s Miserere, played by the Smith Quartet, with Ars Nova of Copenhagen’s version of the original. Maximalism really. STIMMUNG, OLD FRUITMARKET, GLASGOW IN a darkened Fruitmarket sat a hushed audience, some on chairs, some cross-legged on cushions they’d brought from home. At the centre were six members of the Theatre of Voices – three men, three women – each holding a microphone and lit radiantly from within. In a sense this was utter period performance of Karlheinz Stockausen’s 1968 masterpiece Stimmung. The singers even looked the part in bare feet and flowing earthy robes.

Not for a minute to suggest it was simple peace, love and relaxation. Stimmung is technically fiendish. If it’s done well – and it was done brilliantly here – the voices sound fluid and spontaneous, but look closely and you’ll see the singers counting furiously with their fingers. Stockhausen’s score is an elaborate web of 51 musical models (all harmonic overtones), erotic poetry (his own, written for his first wife and sung here in English), magic names (gods of various ethnicity) and a few other words. Much of it would sound funny out of context – in fact, much of it IT’S fitting that many of Norwegian pianist Tord Gustavsen’s finest compositions have been inspired by great poets because the music his group presents is increasingly coming to resemble poetry. It’s certainly created, both in Gustavsen’s initial ideas and in his musicians’ realising of them onstage, with the economy and beautifully chiselled phrasing of poetic writing.

This latest visit found the quartet becoming more expansive on material drawn from Gustvasen’s splendid new album, The Well, as well as going back into the trio recordings that forged his reputation. There was a newfound buoyancy at play, especially in drummer Jarle Vespestad’s use of his bass drum to propel the rhythm and in his general loosening of the beat, and while Gustavsen seems unlikely ever to introduce racing bebop tempos, the variety of mood, tone, texture and pacing that’s achieved within his essential, carefully understated approach is really quite remarkable.

Token of Tango referenced both the nominal dance style and the blues, through saxophonist Tore Brunborg’s gorgeously plaintive voicing, and flavours of Brazil, in bassist Mats Eilertsen’s berimbaulike, bouncing bowed solo, Norwegian folk music and Gustavsen’s beloved gospel influences all featured in a set that was quietly but profoundly gripping. It took two encores to persuade the audience to leave and when they did so, there’s every chance that, like your reviewer, they had Gustavsen’s final melody – or any one of its dozen or so predecessors – playing on the internal jukebox. IF THESE SPASMS COULD SPEAK, ARCHES, GLASGOW A LARGE, almost throne-like white armchair sits in the middle of a raised platform: it can only be accessed by a rise of steps. It’s a succinct visual metaphor for the challenges Robert Softley faces in his everyday life and career: he has severe cerebral palsy, muscular dystrophy and a speech impediment. As Softley crawls onto the stage, there’s a roguish grin on his face, maybe because he knows his monologue, his very presence, is a challenge to how society still pigeon-holes the disabled – and it’s probably not as the kind of welleducated, successful writer/ performer who now entertains us with personal anecdotes of a frank and sometimes horny nature.

The man is a charmer. Goodlooking, self-aware and a slyly witty raconteur, he weaves together moments from his own, and three other people’s, experiences of physically limiting disability. As grainy monochrome portraits come and go on the screen behind him, their very stillness eloquently counterpoints the random restlessness that, in one instance, saw him stripped of clothes and dignity by a curious hospital doctor: Softley was actually a visitor, not a patient.

This incident, like most of his solo show is rendered wryly humorous. But it’s when he muses on his body’s deteriorating condition and how that will impinge on future choices and relationships that you truly appreciate Softley’s untrammelled passion for being alive in the moment – fine, fierce and inspirational.