IN recent times it has been near-impossible to avoid the issue of concert halls, at home and abroad. Hamburg's new home for the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra has announced a programme that includes visits by Bryn Terfel, Yo-Yo Ma, Mitsuko Uchida and the Vienna Phil, while the new Queen Elisabeth Hall in Antwerp will be the home of the Royal Flemish Philharmonic Orchestra, whose principal conductor is Philippe Herreweghe and whose assistants have included Jaap van Zweden and the near-ubiquitous Martyn Brabbins. You could almost feel the pride of the Flanders faithful resonating around the description of the hall, right down to its accessibility and its nearness to tram stops – try that one in Edinburgh, mate.

Much nearer home, it is full steam ahead in the RSNO’s new Centre and auditorium. Last week I was on the admin floor for the first time: it’s high up, open plan and seems spacious (if busy) and airy. The auditorium, opened for business just over a year ago, already looks like a success story: it has hosted symphony concerts, small-scale contemporary concerts, chamber concerts, choral events, masterclasses, presentation-type events and open rehearsals. Last week the orchestra took another whirl on the musical roundabout, with associate leader Bill Chandler wearing his new hat as artistic director of learning and engagement. Chandler and his RSNO brigade presided over a series of primary schools’ concerts which processed over 1000 kids through a set of concerts, basically of classical pops, with new compositions from stalwarts Jay Capperauld and Oliver Searle. Over the last 30 years or so I’ve assessed hundreds of such events. What was different about this one was the “engagement” bit. I’ve not previously seen such a heightened sense of involvement from kids of that age. It was inter-active, it was game-play, and the auditorium buzzed with the dynamism of involvement. It was reminiscent of being at the children’s movies on a Saturday morning in the old days, where we all cheered the hero and booed the baddies. They might be on to something there.

Over in Edinburgh, there are major developments on the concert hall front. We’re all still absorbing the impact and implications of the announcement of moves to build a new concert hall and administration centre – a home, in effect – for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, slap-bang in the heart of the city, at St Andrew Square. This has been talked about for decades. That the Queen’s Hall was inadequate for the SCO, and that the city does not have a medium-scale concert hall, roughly along the lines of Glasgow’s City Hall, is well known.

For me, there was never any argument. Though I usually hear the SCO in Glasgow’s City Hall on a Friday, I once went to hear them in the Queen’s Hall, just for the experience. I never repeated the exercise. I almost didn’t recognise the sound of the band, and the squash on stage was awful (Keith Bruce touched on all this in his SCO review on Monday). When the new hall is built in the capital, there will be serious questions asked about the future of the Queen’s Hall; the Edinburgh International Festival has already declared that its morning series of recitals will be moved to the new building.

Back in Glasgow, meanwhile, not everything is rosy in the Royal Concert Hall. Oh, it’s fine for the RSNO’s traditional weekly concerts, mostly on Saturdays with occasional Thursdays. But things have changed. When Louise Mitchell was director of the hall, there was a programme of international visiting artists, orchestras and soloists. Mitchell looked after them, cultivated them and some of them, such as violinist Maxim Vengerov, became regulars, with Glasgow a priority on their touring schedules. I don’t know the order in which things happened, but Mitchell was deposed and Svend Brown appointed to programme Glasgow Concert Halls. He stopped the visiting artists. I recently read a comment that he couldn’t afford international orchestras, and that’s why he didn’t hire them. That is absolutely not what he told me in an interview for the Herald. Rather, he said that with the stature of conductors the Scottish orchestras had at that time, including Deneve, Runnicles and Ticciati (the last still there) Glasgow didn’t need visiting international groups. He was wrong. It was a dreadful strategy, as the Usher Hall, which picked up the concept in Edinburgh, is currently demonstrating, with their latest guests, tomorrow at 3pm, being the Zurich Chamber Orchestra with superstar trumpeter Alison Balsom and South American pianist Gabriela Montero.

Svend Brown has gone. Glasgow’s fine, with the national orchestras doing the business, and superb flashes of inspiration coming in like lightning from elsewhere, including the Royal Conservatoire (Steven Osborne and Colin Currie recently). We’re down a wee bit on the glam, but it is available elsewhere.