WE are awash with anniversaries this year. Some of them have been noted here, including the 150th anniversaries of Jean Sibelius and Carl Nielsen, which roll on, through recordings and concert performances: we’ve heard performances of four of Sibelius’s seven symphonies (three of them in one concert) in the last few weeks. We have experienced the launch of the RSNO’s 125th anniversary, not quite so immediately striking as it’s being spread over two seasons, though we should include the recent opening of the RSNO Centre in the 125th year package. And we also have the 25th anniversary of Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, which, with the City Hall strand of the Glasgow Concert Halls empire having already mopped up the final stage of its three-year Beethoven survey of the Piano Sonatas and String Quartets, will launch its own Piano Festival in less than a fortnight, with, on opening night, that bruiser from Vienna, out of Bonn, Ludwig van B, elbowing his way into the programme at the mighty hands of John Lill, one of the greatest Beethoven pianists of the era.

Up in Perth, we’ve witnessed the 10th anniversary of Perth Concert Hall which, following the big-bash Nicola Benedetti and Alison Balsom birthday concerts, seems to resonate with a halo effect on other events, including one of the most extraordinary performances I’ve ever witnessed where, just under a fortnight ago, Russian pianistic wizard Denis Kuzhukhin strode onto the stage as though he had a plane to catch, armed only with an I-Pad and appropriate foot control, storming through a gobsmacking performance of Liszt’s arrangement of Wagner’s Tannhauser Overture at a speed that had the I-Pad e-pages of the score whizzing past like lightning, while the poor old digital projector was probably carted off for sedative treatment after the experience.

And that birthday feeling rolls on in Perth this weekend with a three-day chamber music residency by Nicola Benedetti with her long-time accompanist, pianist Alexei Grynyuk, along with her cellist (and partner) Leonard Elschenbroich. That residency began last night, with Nicola in recital, playing the amazing Kreutzer Sonata, continues at noon today with cello sonatas, and culminates tonight in a meaty programme featuring Brahms’ B major Piano Trio and, with BBC SSO principal viola Scott Dickinson joining the group, a Brahms Piano Quartet.

Just last Friday I was reminded of another major 25th anniversary that has already fallen in 2015. I was listening, in the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, to the Stevenson Winds, student players, lavishing their technical and stylistic expertise on seven pieces by composer Sir James MacMillan. He was present, and the occasion cast me back to a famous night in the Royal Albert Hall in London. It’s 25 years ago that MacMillan was catapulted into the trajectory that has led to his global fame with the first performance of The Confession of Isobel Gowdie. I will never forget that night as long as I live. In Scotland we were already getting to know MacMillan’s music a bit, not least through his first major orchestral piece, Tryst. But on that night in London, quarter of a century ago, the world changed for the composer. I remember, before the event, Jimmy and I gave a pre-concert talk. I also recall thinking that the long, expressionless looks we were receiving from the London mafia stimulated the notion in my mind that we must have looked like a couple of Picts who had got over the wall and headed south, lacking only the blue woad. I wonder if they were among those, two hours later, who were on their feet, roaring and stamping, giving the composer a reception and ovation as though they had discovered a new rock star. All that flashed through my mind last Friday, listening to his music being played so idiomatically by these youngsters, almost none of whom would have been born at the time of Gowdie.

And this is exactly the moment to mention another 25th anniversary of 2015. In 1990, composer Sally Beamish moved to Scotland. Sally was already weel-kent as an outstanding viola player in London. I once heard her playing Vivaldi’s Four Seasons with Nigel Kennedy’s band, where her depiction of that pesky barking dog which gruffs its way through a slow movement was wonderfully husky. But Sally wanted to compose, and I have a distant notion that the recommendation that she should move to Scotland, where there was “something in the air”, might have come from James MacMillan. Anyway, up she came, and away she went, in a story that deserves telling in its own right; as does the tale of Mr McFall’s Chamber, 20 this year, delightfully delinquent in some ways, and one of the country’s most off-the-wall outfits. All of this, and more, on another day.