With the ink still drying on his second contract extension as principal conductor of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Robin Ticciati delivered a performance of Haydn's Il Distratto Symphony that summed up exactly why he and the SCO are so good together. This was happy, boisterous music-making: the punchy opening chords glowed with blithe confidence; the fast movements sparkled with daring, dynamic energy; the sound of the orchestra was rounded and robust. Ticciati's operatic leanings (he takes over as Glyndebourne's music director next year) shone through in the flighty Presto and the flowing Adagio, every bit a long-lined aria. Haydn's six-movement symphony is itself an oddity, packed with wonky repetitions and interruptions, but Ticciati didn't overegg the weirdness. The classiness of his conducting comes from building up finely crafted small gestures, not big, brash ones.

After the interval the SCO ventured into less familiar territory with Mahler, not a composer prone to using petite orchestral forces. They played Glen Cortese's reduced version of the song cycle Das Lied von der Erde, which inevitably whittles away the richness of the original, but adds potential intimacy and malleability. Ticciati could have made more of that potential: he played his nuances safe, and the only time the reduction really added rather than detracted colour was in the spare, chilly strings of The Lonely One in Autumn. The cycle's first song is a notorious belter for the tenor soloist, and even in this smaller version, Toby Spence – still rebuilding his voice after an operation for thyroid cancer last year – was drowned out by Mahler's swathes of orchestral sound. Elsewhere Spence struggled to reach high notes and ends of phrases; it was mezzo Karen Cargill, with her nutty, velvet timbre and tender legato, who fully captured the magnitude and vulnerability of Mahler's songs.

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