Braxton - Ghost Trance Music (Belfast, 2026)

Anthony Braxton - Ghost Trance Music

Sonorities Festival Belfast, 2026

Multiphonic Miniatures – Sarah Watts
Tesserae (a graphic score in G minor) – Ioana Petcu-Colan
Ghost Trance Music – Anthony Braxton

Queen's University, Sonic Arts Research Centre, Belfast - 18th April 2026

"You Might Not Like It" is the disarming but refreshingly honest motto for Belfast's biennial Sonorities Festival of new and experimental music performances, panels and workshops, but for those of us 'in the know' or perhaps more accurately those of us who have some idea to expect the unexpected it's an opportunity to open your mind to the possibilities of what new and future music can be. You still might not always 'like' it but you will definitely hear music unlike anything you've heard before, often played on objects you've never thought of as musical instruments and, if open to the experience, you are likely to be impressed at the imaginative programming, the musicianship and the unique creativity of the works. I was only able to make it to one event this year, but all those elements were definitely on display in the programme of pieces for Ghost Trance Music.

The programme opened with a short solo piece by Sarah Watts, a familiar figure here as a member of the city's new music specialists the Hard Rain SoloistEnsemble. The piece was advertised as 'Multiphonic Miniatures' but in a change of programme or perhaps as an alternative title Sarah Watts played her composition 'It's All I've Known', a piece written as a site specific work that was to be played on contrabass clarinet in the closed down disused cooling tower of the Nottinghamshire Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station. Much more than being an experiment in acoustics, the piece is a response of a community to the closure of the station, a familiar landmark in the town, a place where many have worked for years, part of the whole fabric of the community.

Watts' resonant music evoked that deep connection between the place and the people, the sound engineer at the QUB Sonic Arts and Research Centre creating a surround-sound echoing reverb that somehow managed to replicate the sense of being in the building, while a projection of a series of photographs rising up the interior of the cooling tower were projected on a large screen behind the stage. The intent to place you within the music is ideally what every composer wants and this was as close to being there as possible, but the music itself was also just as effective in connecting to a place lost in time and memories, fitting in perfectly with the nature of programme's ghost trance music theme.

Ioana Petcu-Colan, first violinist and leader of the Ulster Orchestra and wonderful advocate for new music, found another new and original way to expand the scope of music and extend its outreach with a score that is unique in its compositional form with her composition 'Tesserae (a graphic score in G minor)'. I recall Brian Irvine (also on the stage later this afternoon) introducing the Brilliant Corners Jazz Festival audience to the wonders of the graphic score by getting members of the audience to scribble on a flip-chart and present it to his 12 piece orchestra to play. In 'Tesserae' Ioana Petcu-Colan took the graphic score to the level of multimedia artwork in five sections which she created and which was displayed just outside the hall. Incorporating pieces of broken cello strings and previously-played violin bow hair, the piece becomes the score, the blue representing G Minor, the rest open for three musicians from the Hard Rain SoloistEnsemble - David McCann (cello), Aisling Agnew (flute), Sarah Watts (contrabass clarinet) - to interpret and play.

The idea of an artwork for a music score might sound a little random, experimental and abstract but musically, as played by the ensemble, it was expressive and accessible and came across beautifully as interpreted by the musicians. Normally working with a conventional score, although often with markings for extended techniques, this was a new kind of a challenge, requiring not improvisation exactly, but very much about interpreting and responding in the moment. I spoke to Ioana afterwards and she was delighted that the performed piece sounded almost exactly as she imagined, but the beauty of the score is that it is not fixed as conventional notes on a page and would be capable of sounding quite different with other musicians and instruments in another location entirely. As such there is no predetermined meaning that the score is meant to represent, it being rather an attempt to get across a musical idea on the part of the composer, incorporating objects that have actual musical and performance history, translating that through the installation and the musicians to speak to the listener. I found it wonderfully entrancing, which is presumably the intent of a programme based around Ghost Trance Music.

The challenges of musical interpretation take on another level of complexity entirely when presented with a graphic score by Anthony Braxton. Notionally a jazz composer and musician, Braxton's music is much more varied and defies any easy categorisation. Indeed, as Alexander Hawkins noted when he introduced the piece, Braxton never settles for doing the same style of music or work with a band of the same musicians for very long. His 'Ghost Trance Music' compositions, which comprise of around 150 pieces written between 1995 and 2006, must present a formidable challenge for any group of musicians to approach, combining traditional and graphic scores with space left within that for improvisation, interpretation and even inclusion of other pieces of his compositions.

That challenge is made just that little bit easier I imagine when you have eight musicians (and composers) of the highest level on the stage of the SARC, including several who have played regularly alongside Braxton. The Hard Rain SolistEnsemble with Ioana Petcu-Colan on violin were joined with Brian Irvine on electronics, Matthew Wright on turntable and live sampling, Alexander Hawkins on piano and Stephen Davis on drums. The 45-minute performance of 'Ghost Trance Music - Composition #245' is indeed intended to bring the listener into a trance-like state through its evolving and changing parts. It can sound chaotic when all eight musicians are playing together - or not so much chaotic as difficult to find a musical centre - but little modular sound groups of several musicians develop and expand on pulses and rhythms suggested by the graphic score and draw the listener in compellingly.

It's just as easy however to find yourself lost as get yourself lost in the composition, not always knowing where all the sounds were coming from in that "joyful commotion" as Sonorities prefer to describe the programming. Is that sound you're hearing electronics, turntable sampling, prepared piano, Alexander Hawkins's electronic box of tricks or that wind-up musical box that Aisling Agnew is holding to the microphone? to say nothing of the percussive sounds played on all the instruments - but the key is not to trying too hard to find a way in but instead let the music take you there. And essentially this is what this programme and the Sonorities Festival Belfast is all about, recommending that you to put aside preconceived ideas of what you think music should be and let the composer's music carve its own course via the musicians. You just need to open up and let it in.

Towards the end of the performance Alexander Hawkins scuttled across the stage with a sheet of music to give cues to Davis and Irvine to presumably include an unplanned concluding section. You expect experienced improvisational musicians like Hawkins, Davis, Wright and Irvine to be able to adapt to such a change but it was also taken up seemingly effortlessly by the experienced Hard Rain Ensemble musicians who, as practitioners of new and experimental contemporary music, never looked at all out of their comfort zone. It was around that point that I found that I was finally yielding to the ghost trance state just as the piece ended, or perhaps it's only when the music ends that you realise you've been there all along and probably even from the beginning of the whole programme.

External links: Sonorities Festival Belfast, Hard Rain SoloistEnsemble

Irvine - Where We Bury the Bones (Belfast, 2026)

Brian Irvine - Where We Bury the Bones

Dumbworld, 2026

Sinead Hayes, John McIlduff, Megan O'Neill, Stephanie Dufresne, Cristian Emmanuel Dirocie

The Lyric Theatre, Belfast - 11th March 2026

Where do you start? The last time I began a review with those words was in my years as a film reviewer having just watched a screening of Terrence Malik's film The Tree of Life. It was less a sense of bewilderment at what I had seen on the screen than a question provoked by the film's extraordinary scope and ambition. A bewildering overreach for some, utterly sublime as far as I was concerned, I saw it as an attempt by a visual artist to put across something that is impossible to put entirely into words alone. For similar reasons it seems an appropriate way to start a review of Where We Bury the Bones, a multi-disciplinary work created by Dumbworld team of John McIlduff & Kate Heffernan with music composed by Brian Irvine who, with an orchestra and a singer, have a few more tools at their disposal to approach a challenging subject.

The title has ominous connotations for the people of this island and I imagine it evokes similar horrors for people in many other places that have seen war and violence in recent decades, and indeed in the world today. That's not what the piece is about, although it could certainly be seen to be a part of it, as the work starts with the discovery of various artefacts during an archaeological dig in Kilkenny, one of which is a bone. One of the first considerations is to identify whether it is a human bone and to look for any signs of trauma, indications of an injury or violent death, as that would be the beginning of a story, a way of building a picture of a life. As an archaeologist René, in an onscreen message, considers that there are limitations on how much scientific enquiry can imagine, and wonders what an artist would make of such material. That's the beginning of Where We Bury the Bones.

Well, that's one starting point but we may actually need to go back further than that. Where indeed do you start to consider the circumstances that lead to an ancient bone being found in this part of the world? A narrative description has already set the scene, considering the historical formation of the valley, building up a picture through our understanding of the geology, chemistry, behaviours and patterns in nature, the valley hewn by ice and shaped by the flow of the river, but there is more than one starting point here, there are layers of history and the flow of time has also contributed to the picture. These are marked out by a number of musical and theatrical layers including a sung voice, technical and historical data feeds, dramatic presentation, a music score played by an 8-piece orchestra, dance movements, and a live projection of an actual scale model of the landscape in question.

"Where do you start?" I admit does apply to some extent with grappling with understanding what the work is about. Where We Bury the Bones started as a commission for the Kilkenny Arts Festival in 2025, the work stemming from the questions that arise with the discovery of a single bone unearthed during archaeological excavations in Kilkenny’s Abbey Quarter. So the work is 'site specific' in a way, but evidently it has a much wider remit and perspective, so is indeed hard to know where to start. As a work of many layers, there are similarly many layers and ways to approach the work. Words are just one way, but that alone can never be entirely sufficient even if Megan O'Neill, dressed in white, appears to give voice to the bone itself. Interacting with the other elements however, how the music speaks and how bare technical facts meet with lived human experience - past, present and looking to the future - allows the viewer to piece together their own story and indeed their own part in the story.

The past is evoked in snatches of traditional Irish music, some the on-stage orchestra interacting with an on-screen musician, the present with the creation of a skateboard park that is overlaid on the site. On a voice-over, some of the skaters testify to its importance to the here and now, a place where community comes together but also a place where new stories are made and another layer of history and archaeological mystery may be laid down for the future. The scope of what is brought together over the running time of one hour is tremendous and Brian Irvine's music has a large part to play in creating that environment, creating the musical landscape to bring it all together. As a composer Irvine has never been tied down to a single style of music but uses whatever instruments and means of expression are necessary for any given work. His score for this work has a 'voice' without telling a ‘story’, the theatrical chamber orchestration reminding me of Louis Andriessen, but with a directness and purpose of its own, anchored in the landscape in its unearthing of people and history but liberated in the flow of time; past, present and future layered. 

There is no narrative line to tell you any of this. Where We Bury the Bones doesn't rely on theatrical conventions or familiar musical reference points or motifs, it doesn't settle for fitting it to preconceived ideas or tell you what you should be taking away from this. It does what it should do which is to let the medium determine the best way of getting the ideas across, building a picture, allowing the multi-disciplinary elements to create their own connections as well as creating the space for the individual in the audience to place themselves within it. If you come out of seeing an production wondering what it was all about, that is much better than having answers handed to you. In the case of the scope and ambition of what this work is about, answers would be impossible anyway in an hour-long performance, but it does nonetheless give you everything you need to think more deeply about our place in this world for a long time afterwards, along with the realisation that we take too much of it for granted.

External links: Dumbworld

Irvine - Least Like the Other (Dublin, 2021)

Brian Irvine & Netia Jones - Least Like the Other

Irish National Opera, 2021

Fergus Sheil, Netia Jones, Amy Ní Fhearraigh, Stephanie Dufresne, Ronan Leahy, Aoife Spillane-Hinks

O'Reilly Theatre, Dublin - 17 September 2021

One thing you could be sure of in an opera by Brian Irvine was that was never going to be anything conventional about it. I've seen the Belfast composer's work performed in a number of ways, in orchestral commissions for the BBC and Ulster Orchestra, in jazz improvisations with his own ensemble and his uncategorisable thrash classical improvisation work 13 Vices with Jennifer Walshe. A short opera piece that he did as part of a NI Opera Shorts commission in 2012 might have suggested the direction of his first full length opera, but the title Least Like the Other seems to apply to just as much to Brian Irvine as the subject of his new opera.

If however there is anyone in contemporary music that Irvine can be compared to, it's maybe Gerald Barry. There same sense of adventure, of a drama delivered at a furious pace, a determination not to accept limitations or conventions, but whereas Barry can appear frivolous - when in fact his operas are highly complex, considered and perfectly attuned to the content - there is at least no sense that there is any room for frivolity in this opera's subject of Rosemary Kennedy. Rosemary is one of the lesser known siblings in the Kennedy family, but there is a good reason for that, and it's the choice of subject that undoubtedly brings out a wide variety of music and theatrical techniques from a composer delving into the dark unknown.

Perhaps the only way Least Like the Other: Searching for Rosemary Kennedy can be compared to classic opera is in the subject being that of a woman at odds with the world around her, at odds through no choice of her own with conventional social expectations in a largely - totally - patriarchal system. And, like the great Italian operas, the end is inevitably a tragic one. Born in 1918, Rosemary Kennedy, the third of the Kennedy siblings and sister of John F. Kennedy, could have been expected to have had a better start in life and more opportunities in the early to mid-twentieth century, but even aside from her being born with a disability, her path through life would still be curtailed and even destroyed by outside factors and social pressures.

Rosemary's troubles and certainly the most damaging factor on her life began at birth and even that can be attributed to the prevailing social and patriarchal order. The doctor was late to arrive at her birth, so her mother Rose was told to hold child in until he arrived otherwise he would not be paid for delivery. Due to a lack of oxygen in birth canal, Rosemary was born intellectually disabled. At the age of 23 she was subjected to a lobotomy, a new technique developed by neurologist Walter Freeman, as an attempted cure for her increasingly difficult behaviour. As a result she was left with capacity of a 2 year old, unable to walk or speak. She would spend the next 57 years of her life in a convent, removed from the Kennedy family.

As that also meant that she was removed from society, there is very little documentary record of Rosemary's life. Irvine's approach to this subject then is defined to some extent by the lack of source material, but it is certainly not limited by it. Working with theatre and opera director Netia Jones, the collaboration manages to bring the full horror of the story to life, as well as casting a critical eye on the kind of society that allows such things to take place. Least Like the Other turns out to be one of those works where music and theatre come together to create a narrative that goes beyond mere dramatic representation.

Essentially, it would be difficult in any case to have a glamorous soprano or mezzo-soprano represent Rosemary Kennedy. There is only one singing voice in the opera but the singer doesn't play Rosemary as much as provides a focal point for the pressures placed on her by the system, her family, religion, social expectations, and as a woman being generally submissive to the needs of men. She is almost a Not-Rosemary, the negation of the personality by those around her, by the social and family pressures around her, which are vividly played out in a number of scenes.

The opera might only have one singer, along with two actors and a voice-over narrator, but it also has music and theatre. The medical texts detailing lobotomy aims and procedures as a cure for the feeble minded and as a tool to control the criminality in the lower classes, the aggrandising speeches by Freeman and the autobiographical extracts from Rosemary's mother all convey the shock and horror for the primitive views on child rearing and treatment of mental illness, but Irvine's music and his writing for the voice - by turns insistent, elegiac and furious - allows you to feel it as it would be experienced by someone going through it; It's not the singer who is Rosemary Kennedy, it's the audience.

Although she lived a long life after the botched and crude surgery she was subjected to, it's at the point where Rosemary is completely deprived of having any control over her faculties or volition that Irvine and Jones close the story. Rummaging through the drawers of her life, everything is strewn across the stage as the music reaches a level of feverish activity, with strobe lighting, and the pre-recorded music by the INO orchestra spread across the theatre in 16-track surround. After that there we are left with an empty stage, with projections showing a body moving gently in a swimming pool to a slow piano accompaniment. Quiet, calm, empty, Rosemary - who loved to swim - is gone, at peace, a mind lost.

First presented at the Galway Festival in 2019 to great critical acclaim, further performances of Least Like the Other planned for 2020 were inevitably cancelled due to the pandemic and lockdown, so it was exciting to have the opportunity to see it in Dublin at the start of the new 2021/22 Irish National Opera season, even in the socially distanced seating of the O'Reilly Theatre. It didn't disappoint. The necessity of a pre-recorded score conducted by Fergus Sheil was used to the advantage of theatrical presentation, and was it played with such intensity, including improvising musicians, that it was virtually impossible to tell that it wasn't being played live.

Soprano Amy Ní Fhearraigh, singing on alternate nights to mezzo-soprano Naomi Louise O'Connell, was certainly singing live and had the technical and emotional range to take on the incredibly challenging role of not just Rosemary, but essentially singing the whole 75 minute opera. That's to take nothing away from the importance of the actors, the delivery of the texts and the whole theatrical presentation in a striking and impressive set design created by director Netia Jones. With Irvine's score, this was a completely immersive and almost gut-wrenching experience, music, singing and dramatic presentation locking together as it should in opera, but even more importantly here with no defined characters and no straightforward dramatic narrative to create a complete, thoughtful and moving operatic experience.

Links: Irish National Opera

NI Opera Shorts

Various - NI Opera Shorts

NI Opera, 2012

Fergus Sheil, Rachel O’Riordan, Giselle Allen, Alex Connolly, Doreen Curran, Paul Carey Jones, Mary McCabe, Eamonn Mulhall, Aaron O’Hare, Gemma Prince, Marcella Walsh

The MAC Belfast, 29 June 2012

Our Day by Conor Mitchell and Mark Ravenhill.
Jackie’s Taxi by Ed Bennett and Stacey Gregg.
The Girl Who Knew She Could Fly by Christopher Norby and Frank McGuinness.
Driven by Deirdre McKay and Richard Dormer.
May Contain Flash Photography by Brian Irvine and Owen McCafferty.

The most ambitious project undertaken yet by the recently formed NI Opera, following an award-winning season that wasn’t exactly short of innovation or experimentation - NI Opera Shorts is a bold venture into the risky territory of contemporary opera. Commissioned as part of the London 2012 Festival celebrations around the summer Olympics, NI Opera Shorts consists of five new short opera works - each running for no more than 15 to 20 minutes - showcasing the work of five local composers, written with local, UK and Irish playwrights. Despite the considerable differences between them in terms of approach, style and tone, there was however a remarkable consistency and coherency that arose out of bringing them together in this way, a fact undoubtedly due to a large extent to the creative team’s vision of the concept and the exceptional performances of the singers and the Ulster Orchestra.

Each of the five short works however has its own dramatic impact, particularly when condensed down into the highly-charged form of the opera short. Our Day by Conor Mitchell and Mark Ravenhill has perhaps the most intense experience in terms of its subject and how it relates most directly to the Troubles, but it’s also extraordinarily ambitious in how it concentrates all complex history and emotional content of that experience into one day and into 15-20 minutes of musical and vocal expression. Dealing with the reaction of one family to a British soldier found wounded on the street, the fear, suspicion, hatred and pain is felt on both sides, mixed in with deeper natural human feelings of grief, loss and compassion that have been suppressed or twisted beyond all recognition. Ravenhill sets this one moment of concentrated feeling moreover on one day in 1972 - at the height of the Troubles when, like that famous Christmas football match on the WWI trenches, all Northern Ireland stopped and came together to celebrate the Olympic gold medal win of Mary Peters, a positive moment of beauty, amazement and achievement that throws the twisted reality of what is happening on the streets into perspective.

The raw emotion of that moment is ratcheted up to an almost unbearable level of tension - I could feel myself clenched up in my seat - as guns are waved and shot, as voices are pitched against each other in hatred and fury almost to the level of a scream, with Conor Mitchell’s discordant and aggressively disturbing atonal accompaniment matching the extremity of all those complex, contradictory feelings compressed into such a small time-frame. It put me in mind of Strauss’ Elektra for the intensity of feeling, and dissection of moment-to-moment conflicting emotions, and I daresay you could even apply twisted family archetypes to the arrangement of the protagonists, so rich in allusion is the piece. A large part in putting this across relied on singers being pushed to their limits, and really, the work of Giselle Allen, Marcella Walsh and Eamonn Mulhall was extraordinarily powerful and genuinely chilling.

Ed Bennett and Stacey Gregg’s Jackie’s Taxi is, by contrast, much more up to the minute with the everyday reality on the streets of contemporary Belfast. It may throw in all the expected topical buzzwords of Facebook, blogs and references to Steve Jobs, but it does so in a way that is specific to present-day Belfast - or at least certain parts of it. I never thought I’d see the day when Belfast hoods, millies and spides would appear on an opera stage, but Jackie’s Taxi successfully manages to do that, and do it in a naturalistic way that doesn’t feel too forced or over-dramatised. The language is appropriately as colourful as the subject matter. Sung in English, in chanted lines with strong Belfast accents, it wasn’t always easy to follow the narrative context - something to do with a taxi driver who makes a few drug deliveries on the side complaining about the hazards of her profession and the standard of her clientele - but musically, with Ed Bennett’s Steve Reich-like percussive rhythms, Jackie’s Taxi captured the Belfast beat much better than any of the other pieces, without having to resort to evoking folk or traditional arrangements. In the music, you can sense the pulse of Belfast, the tension and aggression, the humour and the tendency to enjoy a good moan and it fitted perfectly with the use of language and the content, the staging and choreography ensuring that the piece functioned fully in operatic terms.

I felt that this comprehensive operatic dimension that was evident in the first two pieces, was missing from Christopher Norby and Frank McGuinness’s The Girl Who Knew She Could Fly. McGuinness is one of Ireland’s finest playwrights, and his evocation of two parents commemorating the death of their daughter at the site where she jumped to her death from a motorway bridge was beautiful in its concision as a short drama piece. The monologues of the two characters interweave without ever fully connecting, reflecting how each of them is caught up in the torment of their own shattered lives, caught up in a dance of death and despair that holds them together yet keeps them separate. Those sentiments are expressed just as lyrically in Christopher Norby’s Avro Pärt-like score, but it all felt too interiorised and the whole piece never came together in operatic or dramatic terms, the two singers - finely sung by Doreen Curran and Paul Carey Jones, the voices beautifully arranged for the score - looking out for the most part towards the audience over the motorway. The sound of passing cars and the daughter’s voice added additional textures and tone to the work, but if there was a wider dimension to the relating of the circumstances to the daughter’s death, it was difficult to grasp from this single performance.

Evidence however that a dramatic monologue can be operatically expressive (in the manner of Schoenberg’s monodrama Ewartung or Frid’s The Diary of Anne Frank) was provided here by Deirdre McKay and Richard Dormer’s Driven. Like Mitchell and Ravenhill’s Our Day, the success of the work lies in how it bridges the complex relationship between the interior and the external, between what drives one to unfathomable actions in response to a distorted view of nature that has been corrupted by war. Driven relates to the figure of Blair Mayne, a highly-decorated soldier who survived dangerous WWII operations and was named as a threat by Hitler, yet this man comes to meet his death driving a red Riley car at speed down a road in County Down. Entering into the mindset of Mayne, the inner conflict, the nightmarish visions that plague him, his attempts to come to terms with his experiences was powerfully expressed by Eamonn Mulhall and vividly put across through his pacing on the all-purpose staging through effective choreography and lighting. The whole piece was given a perfect musical expression in McKay’s driving Nyman-esque chugging cellos and blaring brass that blended the furious churning of memories and impressions with the momentum of the speeding car. An occasional lilt of traditional Irish arrangements could be detected underlying parts of the score - the only work to draw from such sources - but it was used meaningfully and lyrically in the context of the work. For a monodrama to work so well, it demands a compelling performance on the part of the singer and the orchestra and Driven was consummately dramatic, operatic and emotionally charged.

Drama was predominately to the fore in Brian Irvine and Owen McCafferty’s May Contain Flash Photography, but coming from the pen of one of Northern Ireland’s foremost and most successful contemporary playwrights, that’s not unexpected. The strength of McCafferty’s writing here is the same as in his regular dramas, finding an authentic tone and language for the province’s sense of humour and tying it into a peculiarly absurdist outlook that reflects the self-awareness of hopeless cases who would like to believe that somehow they can overcome the odds - as many have done - but somehow realise the dream itself can be more than enough. Here in May Contain Flash Photography, a family watch a curious alternate-reality lottery where the balls relate to emotions, colours and materials rather than to numbers, hoping that the winning combination will change their lives. The humour is a little hit and miss (and not always each to catch on a single run-through), but humour is difficult to achieve in an opera in any case, particularly in such a short piece. It’s fairly ambitious however to attempt this with a relatively large cast of six characters, all of whom have distinct dreams and expression, but the interaction was exceptionally good. Musically, I wouldn’t have thought a Britten-like style of scoring would have worked in such a context, but Brian Irvine fitted the musical arrangements to the drama very well, the composer particularly strong in bringing the whole range of voices, feelings and overlapping monologues together into a harmonious whole.

What was most memorable about the NI Opera Shorts however wasn’t the quality of the individual contributions, but the sheer variety and the broadness of the scope that they covered. It was thrilling to see the diverse range of ideas that these individual voices brought to the project - an impressive showcase of contemporary Northern Irish opera work that one would rarely have the opportunity to hear performed - but despite the wide spread of musical and dramatic approaches, there was actually a wonderfully complementary diversity to the project as a whole that reflected so many aspects of Northern Irish history, personality and culture. A lot of credit for allowing that to happen has to go to the NI Opera’s artistic director Oliver Mears for pulling this hugely ambitious work together and to the stage director Rachel O’Riordan, who met the considerable challenge of making one stage set suit five very different works, but also found the most effective means of putting each of them across in terms of mood and theatrical presentation.

The highest credit of all however must be given to Fergus Shiel and the Ulster Orchestra who brought these short intense works fully to life in all their rhythmic and lyrical complexity as well as their often difficult serial discordance, switching tone between one work and the next with scarcely a pause other than to adjust to the varied instrumental requirements of each piece. In the relatively small venue of the newly opened Belfast MAC, the audience were able to witness the intricacy of the orchestra’s performance of those arrangements, and it was impressive to behold. The intimacy of the venue (one hopes it will be used again for similarly smaller-scale and even local operatic works in the future) means that there is nowhere to hide any weaknesses, and in this respect the singing of such difficult works must also be judged to be of the highest order, with some fine new talent on display as well as the reliable strengths of Doreen Curran, Paul Carey Jones and Giselle Allen. I’ve yet to be disappointed by anything that the recently formed NI Opera have put on, but with the opening work of their second season, they continue to take on fresh new challenges. Their most ambitious project so far, NI Opera Shorts was another resounding success.