Hercules Dux Ferrariae - O Riada

Irish Concertino - Stanford

Piano Concerto in C Op 5 - Philip Cogan

With the Wild Geese - Harty

The BBC's free invitation concert with the Ulster Orchestra on St Patrick's Day was a model of its kind. The Irish music most widely heard on this particular day is rarely from the classical tradition. Last Friday's Belfast programme managed to stretch back as far as a 1790 Piano Concerto by Philip Cogan and also included the finest of Sean O Riada's orchestral works, his Hercules Dux Ferrariae of 1957.

Hugh Tinney handled the C major Piano Concerto by Cork composer Philip Cogan (17501833) with a deft lightness which easily integrated its often floridly decorated melodic lines into a convincingly-shaped whole. Thierry Fischer, the Ulster Orchestra's principal conductor elect, brought an almost period-instruments flavour to the Ulster Orchestra's accompaniment of this light piece. But neither soloist nor conductor managed to rescue the composer from the failings of the finale, a set of variations distinctly lacking in an adequate sense of variation.

Fischer secured a strong sense of fresh perspectives, too, to Hamilton Harty's With the Wild Geese, a late-romantic tone poem from 1910, which the Hillsborough-born composer prefaced with two poems by Emily Lawless.

Stanford's late Irish Concertino of 1918, which was being heard for the first time in its orchestral version, proved rather less tractable to the Fischer magic. The best moments actually came from the cello soloist, Alexander Baillie (a last-minute replacement for the indisposed Aisling Drury-Byrne). Violinist Fionnuala Hunt too often sounded unyielding of contour and rather rough in tone.

Sean O Riada was in his mid20s when he wrote his Hercules Dux Ferrariae for string-orchestra, a piece which, like Benjamin Britten's Bridge Variations of two decades earlier, is clearly intended to make a suitable impression as a young composer's calling card. It even dabbles lightly with the serial techniques then so fashionable in avantgarde circles. Fischer took an entirely fresh view of the piece, making it sound both more adventurously modern in tone and solid in substance than I've ever heard before. As a foretaste of the Ulster Orchestra's new conductor's reign, due to start in September 2001, this concert augured very well indeed.