Martin Adams reviews Bernstein's On the Waterfront Suite and more, while Dermot Gault reviews Puccini's Madam Butterfly at the Waterfront Hall in Belfast.

Gringolts, RTÉ NSO/Kok

NCH, Dublin

Bernstein - On the Waterfront Suite. Sibelius - Violin Concerto.

Prokofiev - Symphony No 3.

Security and neatness were in evidence on Friday night, when the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra was conducted by Nicholas Kok. Reliability in demanding music made this a commendable concert, even though neither of the large works made the impact they can.

It would be hard to beat the beauty of tone and subtlety of shaping which Ilya Gringolts brought to the solo part of Sibelius's Violin Concerto. This young player is one of those rarities whose musicianship seems flawless, whose virtuosity is as unobtrusive and modest as his platform presence, and who seems incapable of doing anything vulgar.

However, the Sibelius is earthy music, and sounds best when pressed towards the edge.

By that standard, Gringolts's playing was too measured, too good-mannered. Although the RTÉ NSO and Nicholas Kok did well in creating clean ensemble, there was a disparity between evident effort and the sound which reached the auditorium; and they were not helped by the National Concert Hall's acoustics, which cut dead the intensity of such bass-rich orchestral writing. Everything sounded too nice. It was revealing that the evening's most complete performance came in the Sibelius works which Gringolts presented as encores.

While the scoring and ideas of Humoresques Nos. 4 and 5 are of the lighter kind, the music is extraordinarily subtle and sophisticated. It was perfect. Bernstein's Symphonic Suite On the Waterfront was neat, but not hairy enough for music as gritty as the film from which it is derived. And while a similar point could be made about the playing of Prokofiev's Symphony No. 3, which closed the concert, one could see that this flamboyant music deserves its reputation as one of the most important works from that composer's middle years.

Martin Adams

Ukrainian National Opera of Odessa

Waterfront Hall, Belfast

Puccini - Madam Butterfly.

A number of touring opera companies from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union have visited Belfast in recent years, generally providing excellent singing but often relying on makeshift stagings. The publicity for this performance promised "a stunning Japanese set", but while the costumes were appropriate, the set, with its painted backdrop, fish-tanks and little bridges, was a disappointment. I found the perpetually trickling waterfall and the live fish something of a distraction.

Musically, the performance was uneven. Conductor Gheorghe Stanciu allowed the tension to drop in the quiet passages near the end (the waterfall was especially distracting here). The small orchestra sounded undernourished and the intonation, especially from the winds, was often queasy. The best singing came from the men, especially Vladimir Dragos as Sharpless and Ruslan Zinevych who as Pinkerton was fresh-voiced and youthfully insouciant.

In the demanding title role - the teenager who has to soar over the orchestra - the Korean-American soprano Rosa Lee Thomas had an agreeable but smallish voice. Nadezhda Stoianova as Suzuki gave good support, but the performance as a whole had a restricted dynamic range and therefore a restricted emotional range. This was a small-scale Butterfly, a silhouette seen behind a paper screen.

Dermot Gault