Did Rory MacDonald, standing beneath the golden ceiling of St Andrew's in the Square, look at the Scottish Opera Orchestra on Sunday as if he would next be seeing them in the pit of the Theatre Royal?

Did the players quizzically look back at MacDonald as if he might be a future musical director? Either way, or neither way, this was a fascinating concert with a programme deftly assembled to display the potential of any future relationship between them.

Stirling-born MacDonald is still very young, but, on the evidence of his first major appearance in his homeland, this seems hardly a handicap. The excerpts from Idomeneo at the start of the programme showed him to be not only a natural opera conductor (he has already worked at Glyndebourne) but someone alert to the undercurrents of one of Mozart's trickiest works.

In Judith Weir's Tiger under the Table, which followed, he showed a similar flair for Scottish idiosyncracy in this fable for 14 instruments, demanding, as the composer herself has claimed, "exceptional energy in the bass register". With bassoon and double bass representing the tiger's roar, the scenario - wittily unfolded in MacDonald's performance - showed conflicting musical personalities gradually learning to live together. Yet this was not the concert's only novelty. Later came two tiny Sibelius melodramas in which haunting Nordic poems, luminously spoken by Anders Ostberg, were set against the softness of strings and harp. Samples of Sibelius at his purest, they slid effectively into Tchaikovsky's String Serenade, treated, or so it seemed, as a poetic evocation of the operatic world of Eugene Onegin.