THE BBC National Orchestra of Wales paid its first visit to the Waterfront Hall in Belfast on Saturday in a musically well-chosen, all-English programme that was hardly designed to succeed at the box office. But the small audience was treated to some fine music-making under Richard Hickox, a specialist in this area of repertoire who is in his first season as the orchestra's principal conductor.
Frank Bridge's 1927 rhapsody Enter Spring mixes reflective pastoralism with flavours altogether more modern, all presented in splendid orchestral garb. Sarah Connolly, a late stand-in for the indisposed Pamela Helen Stephen, was a solid, rather matter-of-fact soloist in Elgar's Sea Pictures, where Hickox exercised himself to extract every last ounce of colour from these long-faded songs.
The conductor was in his element, too, in Vaughan Williams's London Symphony. Even as experienced a hand as Hickox's can't quite mask the triteness of some of the material. But his absorbing performance was lovingly and meticulously detailed in a manner more often heard on disc than successfully reproduced in the concert hall.
