Ulster Orchestra/Christoph Eberle

Overture Cosi Fan Tutte - Mozart

Piano Concerto No 23 in A K 488 - Mozart

Symphony No 5 in D - Vaughan Williams

It was pleasant for once to hear a programme which does not pull out all the stops. This was delightful music, very nicely played.

The Mozart overture was beautifully light, but the playing was also clear-cut and well detailed, with an underlying firmness of pulse. The same virtues were evident in the accompaniment for the concerto, which the young Ukrainian pianist Konstantin Lifschitz played with pearly, even tone and an almost doll-like perfection which was hardly marred by a memory lapse in the slow movement. His playing may not have penetrated the surface, but it was an attractive surface.

The Ulster Orchestra is at home in Vaughan Williams, and the strings produced just the right warm, transparent tone for his atmospheric Fifth Symphony. This is an elusive, deceptively simple work, and it takes a particularly sympathetic performance to reach the spirituality beneath the English pastoralism. Eberle conducted understandingly in the first three movements, and the scherzo, with its fleeting contrasts of light and shade, went particularly well, but the slow movement just missed the feeling of the "journey to the unseen light" of which the composer speaks, and the finale failed to be the grand cumulation it should have been.