Music: RSNO/Sondergard, Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, Keith Bruce, four stars

Thanks to his millions of social media followers, YouTube channel, contracts with fashion labels and partnership on the music practice app, Tonic, Taiwanese/Australian soloist Ray Chen attracted some new young faces to the RSNO’s season concerts. The orchestra will be hoping some of them return, and that the European tour with the violinist in January is similarly successful at the box office.

On Saturday night all but a few returned after the interval to hear an excellent Dvorak 6, the symphony that really established the Czech composer’s reputation in Britain, and the first to find a publisher. Its slow second movement has a much-underrated Dvorak melody and conductor Thomas Sondergard revelled in the dynamic push and pull of the Scherzo that follows.

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Composed when he was 40 years old, the Sixth is arguably the first great work of Dvorak’s maturity, and the multi-layered and sophisticated orchestration of the Finale was a delight here, with sparkling contributions from the RSNO’s wind soloists.

Sondergard’s crisp, nimble way with the symphony stood in marked contrast to Chen’s approach to the Sibelius Violin Concerto that preceded it. He is a very theatrical performer, especially facially, and he brought a dramatic intensity to his part from the opening bars, not entirely in the service of the music, which really requires a more measured and thoughtful approach to the opening movement.

It also left the soloist with fewer options later in the work when the composer, himself a fine violinist, ups the ante – particularly in the so-called “polonaise for polar bears” of the work’s conclusion.

In the last century it was the virtuoso Jascha Heifetz who championed the Sibelius Violin Concerto, and Chen now plays the “Dolphin” Stradivarius once owned by Heifetz, and the young man’s honed showmanship is matched by technique as well as by the instrument. His encore, of the 21st of Paganini’s Caprices, was introduced as just that – a stretching party piece that he was proud to have mastered.

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The concert had begun with the Scottish premiere of Finnish composer Lotta Wennakoski’s Of Footprints and Light, one of a series of works commissioned by the Helsinki Philharmonic asking contemporary composers to respond to pre-1945 Finnish works.

Perhaps Sibelius inspired others, but Wennakoski celebrated the altogether more obscure Ida Moberg in a piece that began with bowed percussion and percussive techniques on the strings and ended with a memorable exchange of glissando figures among the front desk players. From its repeated top notes on the harp to the muted tuba it was a fine introduction to the sonic range of the symphony orchestra for those young ears present.