Review: Ulster Orchestra concert conjures up the Magic of Christmas to delight of Waterfront Hall audience

The Ulster Orchestra and the Belfast Philharmonic Choir once again demonstrated their versatility with the Magic of Christmas concert in a packed Waterfront Hall, Belfast, on Thursday evening.

Only two weeks earlier they had also filled the Waterfront with a very different audience celebrating Christmas in one of the best performances in years of Handel’s Messiah.

However, this Magic of Christmas concert was firmly in the showbusiness-and-popular-musical-theatre genre, but also with a sprinkling of the traditional Christmas entertainment.

This was a hugely popular family programme to help people ease into the right Christmas spirit, and the orchestra – under the direction of maestro Alfonso Casada Trigo, with experienced professional soloists Katrie Birtill and Shane O”Riordan, whose Cork parents were in the Waterfront – delighted the large audience. Some people might have wished for a little of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Christmas magic from the orchestra, and perhaps even a little of the Messiah from the excellent Belfast Phil, but both combined impressively in the Christmas carol medley.

One of the noteworthy dimensions of this, and other “non-classical” concerts, was the way in which the Ulster Orchestra players entered into the spirit of the occasion, after some of this season’s earlier challenges from Sibelius, Mozart, Benjamin Britten and Prokofiev’s Symphony No 5, which incidentally was one of the highlights of the year so far.

Following the Christmas season, the Ulster Orchestra continues with its normal programme on 12 January when they will feature the wonderful Third Symphony by Brahms, although some people still ask why the management no longer features their New Year Viennese Music Concerts which proved so popular in the past. It is too much to hope for a return of this ageless music of the Strauss family next year?

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, the search goes on for a new principal conductor to succeed the current chief conductor Daniele Rustioni, who leaves in 2024. He has helped to inspire the orchestra to become one of the best in the UK- as demonstrated by the glowing reviews of its BBC Proms performance in the Royal Albert Hall earlier this year.

He will be a hard act to follow, but the Ulster Orchestra has attracted an impressive range of top conductors in its relatively short history since 1966, and might well do so again.