Dance from Akhnaten - Philip Glass

Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten - Arvo Part

The Chairman Dances - John Adams

Heroes Symphony - Philip Glass

Philip Glass is the featured composer of the final week of the Belfast Festival. The major presentation will be his opera for the digital age, Monsters of Grace, to receive two performances on Saturday, and the opening gesture was a concert by the Ulster Orchestra at The Spires on Tuesday.

Glass was present for the occasion, and engaged in a short pre-concert conversation with Jocelyn Clarke. Conversation is hardly the right word for what took place. Glass is a generous talker, voluble, anecdotally well-stocked, philosophical, and apt to side-track as words trigger ideas or ideas trigger themselves.

Time was short, discipline was loose and it was the processes of self-fuelling engagement which seemed most revealing.

The advertised all-Glass programme was shorn of a symphony, in place of which was offered a first half of shorter minimalist pieces, two born out of opera (Glass's Akhnaten and John Adams' Nixon in China) plus Arvo Part's much-aired memorial to Benjamin Britten.

Conductor Robert Ziegler, apparently aiming to deliver the music with a firm hand, straitjacketed the Part and took some of the bounce out of the Adams, but seemed to find a freer interplay in Glass's music from Akhnaten.

Glass is an unlikely symphonist. The original material of his Heroes Symphony comes from David Bowie and Brian Eno and, channelled into six movements of over 50 minutes duration, the effect is dauntingly banal. To be fair, the acoustic of The Spires is not conducive to the communication of distinctively blended orchestral sonorities, and a lot of the playing was rough at the edges. But it was hard not to hear a lot of the motifs, written with an apparently straight face, as sounding circus grotesque in their orchestral garb. The piece was conceived as a ballet for choreographer Twyla Tharp, and on the occasion of its Irish premiere, one certainly missed the distraction of the dance.

The Glass season continues at the Belfast Festival until Saturday. To book telephone Belfast 665577.