More reviews from the feast of classical music taking place in Belfast at the moment.

BBC Music Live

Waterfront Hall, Belfast

The BBC's Music Live festival reflects the range of the broadcaster's music programming, combining the esoteric with music of broad appeal. Familiarity reigned in an opera gala that found the Ulster Orchestra once again in the Waterfront Hall and found me once again in Block E - but a different part of Block E from last time, and, yes, the balance was completely different from what it had been a few seats away and two evenings ago.

The Pearl Fishers Duet, The Chorus Of The Hebrew Slaves, the barcarole from The Tales Of Hoffmann, excerpts from Faust and The Barber Of Seville and some familiar Lehár all featured. The skewed sonic perspective did not favour the singers, although one did hear the cimbasso, a bass brass instrument required by Verdi, to particular advantage.

The Ulster Orchestra played well for Richard Armstrong. Mullingar-born Ailish Tynan and English-born Bonaventura Bottone participated, the former contributing a charming Vilja-Lied.

But the evening really came to life with Karen Cargill's committed singing of O Mio Fernando from Donizetti's La Favorita and William Dazeley's intense performance of Per Me Giunto from Don Carlo.

It was only in these items - as it happens, two of the less familiar numbers - that one felt one was listening to a part of an opera rather than to old favourites being trotted out yet again.

A programme of music inspired by poisonous spiders - now, that really is unfamiliar. L'Arpeggiata, a multinational early-music group directed by Christina Pluhar, presented an evening of tarantismo, music and dance intended to alleviate the effects of tarantula bites. Composers such as Kircher and Landi mingled with traditional sources from the south of Italy.

There's no point in worrying about what these dances would really have sounded like back in the 17th century, as in some cases a chord sequence is all the performers have to go on. The result is that they had to use their imaginations - and they did.

What made this event extraordinary was the stage presentation, which included the Neapolitan tenor Marco Beasley wandering around, apparently reading from a book of verse, and, above all, the dancing of Anna Dego. Again, as to whether 17th-century dancing would have been as sultry or as freely sensuous as this, who knows? Or indeed cares? This was a remarkable performance, embodying the strange melancholy underlying even the liveliest of these folk songs and dances.

It would be interesting to hear more of Lucie Skeaping's group Burning Bush, which gave us songs and dances from the Sephardic Jewish tradition. I was particularly struck by the expressive basso gurglings of a narrow metal clarinet, whose oriental melismas suggested a possible source for the bass clarinet writing in The Rite Of Spring.

There is space only to mention Catherine Bott's dramatic performance of Carissimi's Lament On The Death Of Mary Stuart, really a miniature operatic scena, accompanied by the Scottish harpsichordist David McGuinness. Here too the performers brought the music to life in a way

only the live audience could fully appreciate.

Dermot Gault

Sonorities

Various venues, Belfast

The last of the three Stockhausen concerts at the Sonorities festival of contemporary music was a marathon affair that ran from 5.30 p.m. on Sunday until after 10 p.m. Three works were presented, Oktophonie (Octophony, 1990-91), Mittwochs-Gruss (Wednesday Greeting, 1998), here receiving its world première, and Mittwochs-Abschied (Wednesday Farewell, 1996). All three are part of Licht (Light), the seven-opera cycle whose works are named after the days of the week and on which Stockhausen has been engaged since 1977.

Octophony, from Tuesday, is for eight-track tape, and the composer regards it as the first octophonic piece, as it requires the loudspeakers for the eight channels to be configured as the corners of a cube rather than in a single plane around the listeners.

Stockhausen describes the slow-moving chords of Wednesday Greeting as "a sort of air sculpture", which stretches out its raw material of three-note chords so that the spatial movement can register clearly.

The innovation of Wednesday Farewell is to treat the planes between groups of four loudspeakers as walls of sound. The mixed real-life recordings that constitute the material in this work form "fantasy spaces" whose impossible conjunctions would in normal parlance be simply called collages.

Stockhausen's intellectual and musical rigour is evident at micro and macro level in all these works. There's the familiar rigorous planning of overall shape and minute attention to how sound moves in and fills a space. As ever, the composer recommends listening with eyes closed and encourages notions of floating in space and out-of-body experiences.

But although the presentation was peerless, the content often sounded extremely kitschy. Octophony evokes the sort of outer-space effects much favoured in Hollywood. Wednesday Greeting floats with new-age looseness. And Wednesday Farewell seems like an indulgent travelogue or collage of privately significant experiences. The oft-heard view that Stockhausen's creative achievement has slackened off in recent decades would seem to be borne out by these works.

Clearly the concerns of spatial movement have long been of great moment to him, and one of his spoken introductions gave a momentary clue as to why. He recalled the effect of hearing the movements through space and explosive outcomes of wartime bombs from a musical point of reference as a teenager in Germany.

As things stand, however, most composers and listeners seem content to treat the unusual distribution of sound and spatial movement as special effects, though at the start of the 21st century multichannel home-cinema systems have created a distinct possibility for that to change.

The great innovation of the new performing space at Queen's University Belfast's Sonic Arts Research Centre - the location of loudspeakers beneath the audience - was not greatly exploited in any of the pieces heard there over the weekend.

Sunday lunchtime's Open Fader . . . programme offered works in which the sense of exploration dominated. Michael Edwards's Skin and Martin Parker's Environment concentrated on the live processing of instrumental performance (Mark Summers on viol). Robert Dow's Steel Blue! and Torsten Anders's With Shifting Joints processed sound sources real and virtual. And John Drever's Phonographies Of Exeter sequenced location recordings rather like the sonic equivalent of a holiday video.

I chose to sit in a non-optimal position, in the rear left corner of the audience, to see if the composers would be able to exploit the new venue to avoid the expected dominance of sound from the nearest loudspeaker.

Sadly, on this occasion, they didn't.

Michael Dervan