John Tavener in Belfast and Ani DiFranco.

John Tavener in Belfast

Belfast Festival at Queen's

Michael Dervan

The Belfast Festival at Queen's is the commissioner, with the St Paul Chamber Orchestra in Minnesota, of John Tavener's new orchestral work, Hymn Of Dawn. The première was given on Sunday, by the Ulster Orchestra under Stephen Layton at the Waterfront Hall, as the closing concert of the festival. It was also planned as the climax of a weekend focus on the composer.

On Friday Tavener and one of his favourite performers, Patricia Rozario, took part in a public interview with David McCleery. The composer is well known for his strong views, not so much on Western art as on Western civilization in general. He's known, in particular, for a strong antimodernist stance.

He was, he says, an angry young man, and he likes to convey the notion that he's still angry. His music changed after he was received into the Orthodox Church, in 1977, and in recent years there's been another change, after he felt the need to "withdraw from the body of the church" and "pray with the heart".

Although he's still an Orthodox Christian he proclaims that "all religions are in a state of senility", that "man has made them senile" and that it is "up to the artist to try to retain something of the true essence of those religions". For Tavener all religions are equally true, or, as he put it in Belfast, "each religion contains the whole truth, fully, fully, fully, fully, fully".

The 45-minute Hymn Of Dawn is an ambitious work, constituting "an attempt to conceive a transcendent unity of all religions in the form of a mystical love song". The piece is scored for flute (Paul Edmund-Davies), violin (Darragh Morgan), soprano (Rozario), baritone (Andrew Rupp), percussion (including four players seated around a powwow drum), harp and strings.

Tavener's selected texts, embracing a wide range of traditions and languages, are set, with much doubling of the vocal and instrumental soloists, with the composer's familiar melodic directness.

The style, which makes much use of drones as accompaniment, is highly ritualised, moving from stillness at one extreme to surging ecstasy at the other, and with the greatest suggestions of animation (but not actually wildness or abandon) coming from the powwow drum, which is placed centrally on the stage. Tavener's theatre is a theatre of implacability. The music, more concerned with direct statement than the tensions of development, simply unfolds.

Hymn Of Dawn is dedicated "to my guiding angel, and in memory of Frithjof Schuon", and the other major Tavener work of the weekend was the Schuon Lieder, a setting of 19 poems from the thousands written by Schuon, many in the last years of his life. Tavener, who has been greatly affected by the life and work of the Swiss-born Sufi, prizes the poems as "mystical love songs of an almost palpable femininity, and they represent a distillation of Schuon's magisterial and perennialist doctrine".

Although premièred last July, the songs, completed in July 2003, are actually more recent than Hymn Of Dawn, which was finished more than a year earlier. There are broad similarities between the two works, but the songs, scored for soprano (Gillian Keith), Tibetan temple bells (Gillian McDonagh), string quartet and piano (the Schubert Ensemble), are altogether more varied in melodic style, and the composer's use of canon as a kind of textural device (both in the accompaniments and between the songs) is much more fully engaged than in the orchestral work.

It may well be that Tavener felt freer in treating Schuon's words. But, whatever the cause, the Schuon settings are actually altogether richer and, canons or no, altogether more responsive and spontaneous in effect than Hymn Of Dawn. Gillian Keith, to be sure, doesn't have either Rozario's smoothness of line or her hand-in-glove connectedness in Tavener's music. But it was the Schuon Lieder that made the greater impression, the Hymn Of Dawn seeming a more private, less easily penetrated utterance.

Tavener is quite an idealist in the demands he makes on performers. Like Mozart's, his music can make shortcomings in performance all too clear. The Methodist College Chapel Choir, under Ruth McCartney, provided musical interludes to Friday's public interview. Their singing was admirable in its technical polish, but it didn't always show sufficient awareness of the vertical tensions to be found in Tavener's work. Saturday evening's performance of Funeral Ikos, by the Belfast Philharmonic Choir at Clonard Monastery, was finer. It helped show just how rapidly that musically troubled chorus has been progressing under the care of its new conductor, Christopher Bell.

Ani DiFranco

The Helix, Dublin

Adrienne Murphy

In the packed-out luxury of the Helix there's tangible admiration for the rebel Ani DiFranco's DIY ethos as well as her artistry. Her fierce independence from corporate business (all 16 DiFranco albums are on her Righteous Babe label), alongside the verbal and financial support she gives to peace and social-justice movements, mark out the US singer-songwriter as a beacon of hope in archly conservative America.

There's something visionary about this petite, extraordinarily powerful woman, whose music and poetry transmit the raw experience of hitting the road at an early age, feeding her soul with a steady diet of grass-roots culture and politics.

As she fires through her song list, frequently switching guitars that really do seem to be extensions of her body, accompanied tightly by an innovative double-bass player who creates percussion as well as bass from his instrument, you can't help but feel in the presence of greatness, though DiFranco herself comes across as down to earth and spontaneous in a joyfully innocent, childlike way.

Onstage the music seems to embody and possess the singer. Her voice, leaping back and forth across a vast range, suddenly crashes in waves of primal scream, a beast unleashed, lighting up the ravaged places of the human heart. The sheer delight DiFranco gets from playing live is apparent, yet for all the virtuosity of her performance something is missing.

There's a reserve, a yearning for intimacy that is not quite met. Although the venue's acoustics are state of the art, the Helix is just too big and formal for DiFranco to really touch us in the way she knows best, and the ice doesn't fully melt until the standing ovation and encore, when the crowd breaks free and dances at last.

The other element missing tonight is DiFranco's off-the-cuff humour. She seems a bit deflated, and her only joke is sarcastic. "So much for our voting system," she says. "Press the button on the left and the right lights up." Within hours of President Bush's re-election is not the best time to see Ani DiFranco.