Ulster Hall, Belfast
The Ulster Orchestra scored a number of firsts on Wednesday. JoAnn Falletta, the orchestra’s new principal conductor, and also the first woman and the first American to hold the post, gave her first concert in her new role. And that concert was billed as a “Taster” event, the first the orchestra has undertaken, to give a start of season sampling, at a flat ticket price of £10 (€11.62), of works that will feature in upcoming programmes.
The full evening of what you might call “a hundred best tunes” repertoire was obviously not a concert aimed at the orchestra’s core audience, which can safely be assumed to have a taste for the full works as they will later be played. It could, of course, tempt someone to try a composer or a work that they would normally give a miss. But that can be done in any number of ways, from radio and CDs to YouTube or Spotify.
For the Ulster Orchestra aficionado, there was of course a special interest in the conductor, not just because it was her debut in her hew role, but also because the taster presented her in works that will be conducted by others when they are later heard complete.
The real targets of the venture, I suspect, were orchestral neophytes, or, at least, newcomers to the experience of a live orchestra, which can still provide a frisson that no recording can match.
So how did it all work out in practice? Well, it was all presented as a sort of extended welcome. Falletta was a personable host, introduced the music, talked up the orchestra, and worked at creating a sense of community and ownership between listeners and players.
It helped that the evening's soloists were drawn from the orchestra itself, leader Tamás Kocsis, the svelte violin soloist in Beethoven's Romance in F, and Paul Young, Patrick McCarthy the daring soloists in a Vivaldi concerto for two trumpets.
The orchestra’s upcoming season has the all-embracing theme World of Music, which is really no theme at all. The international flavour of the orchestral repertoire is so varied that it would take a narrow theme to create an exception.
But roving through the style of 11 composers in a single evening is still an unusual challenge. And Falletta and her players met it best when the colours were at their most vivid, in the insistent beat of Falla's Ritual Fire Danceand the raw, streetwise vitality of Times Squarefrom Bernstein's On the Town.It's no accident that Falletta's next programme, opening the Belfast Festival on October 14th, will be an all-American affair.
