The Ulster Orchestra is to premiere four new works by Irish composers as part of its summer series of BBC-funded Invitation Concerts in venues across Northern Ireland.

Each of the works will be heard twice, first separately in concerts exploring Mozart’s violin concertos, and again, all together, in the final performance of the five-concert series.

Greg Caffrey’s tongue-in-cheek Theophilus in Space imagines what Mozart’s music might have sounded like if alien creatures had found fragments of the coloratura-saturated Queen of Night’s Aria from The Magic Flute and tried to reassemble it. It will be heard alongside Mozart’s First Violin Concerto (with NCH Rising Star 2006 Elizabeth Cooney as soloist), Fauré’s Dolly and Hindemith’s Mathis de Maler, with Howard Shelley conducting the orchestra at the Whitla Hall, Belfast on 3 August.

Unbreakable, by Frank Lyons, will receive its first performance at the Millennium Forum, Derry on 9 August in a programme that also includes Mozart’s Fifth Violin Concerto and works by Haydn, Hindemith and Prokofiev.

At the Island Arts Centre, Lisburn on 17 August, Mozart’s Violin Concerto No 3 and music by Stravinsky and Falla accompany the premiere of Rachel Holstead’s Time is a Spiral which takes as its starting point ‘the last movement of Mozart’s Fifth Violin Concerto, beginning with a wisp of the original minuet, seemingly frozen in time, and from which still centre the piece unwinds. The pace increases and we jump from one idea to another in an increasingly erratic rondo, emerging towards the end in a lurching minuet, more Holstead than Mozart’.

Bill Campbell’s Dig In relies heavily on Mozart’s musical vocabulary to travel briefly back to the venerable composer’s own time before being pulled back to the present. It is heard alongside Mozart’s Second Violin Concerto and Haydn’s Pauken Messe in St Patrick’s RC Cathedral, Armagh on 24 August.

All four works will be heard together as a unified piece in the final concert of the series (also featuring Mozart’s Fourth Violin Concerto and Stravinsky’s Orpheus) at the Clonard Monastery, Belfast on August 31 led by the Ulster Orchestra’s newly appointed principal conductor Kenneth Montgomery.

Tickets are free and advanced booking is advised. For further details, see the Calendar or visit www.ulster-orchestra.org.uk.

Posted: 21 July 2007