Name: Flame of Genius
Start: 2025-03-14T19:45:00
Location: Belfast

Dive into a captivating musical journey with the Ulster Orchestra's diverse season lineup. Featuring celebrated works from Bruch's iconic Violin Concerto No. 1 to the legendary tunes of The Rat Pack, this season promises a rich palette of orchestral performances. Highlights include folky inspirations in 'Saints and Scholars', the scenic 'Highland Journey', and an evocative blend of jazz and symphony in 'April in Paris'. Each event, rich in history and musical mastery, offers audiences an immersive experience.

A Cultural Symphony: Ulster Orchestra's Musical Season Lineup

The Ulster Orchestra is set to captivate audiences with a series of diverse orchestral events. From the soulful melodies of Bruch’s Violin Concerto to a nostalgic trip through Broadway classics, each performance promises to offer a unique musical experience. Highlights include Aleksey Semenenko's violin prowess, the Rat Pack tribute by Stuart Morley, and Fiona Monbet's jazz-infused orchestral recital, 'April in Paris'. Join us as we explore how these events reflect both the history and future of orchestral music.

Ulster Orchestra's Enchanting Journey: A Celebration of Music and Culture

The Ulster Orchestra's 2025 season promises a rich tapestry of musical experiences, from the cosmic landscapes of 'The Great Outdoors' to the dramatic flair of 'Flame of Genius', and the nostalgic journeys of 'Essentially Broadway'. Each event is meticulously crafted to captivate audiences, featuring world-class soloists, conductors, and breathtaking compositions that span genres and centuries. Whether it's the symphonic storytelling of Haydn or the filmic majesty of Hans Zimmer and John Williams, this season offers something for every music aficionado.

Ulster Orchestra's 2025 Season: A Symphony of Nature, Drama, and Iconic Melodies

In 2025, the Ulster Orchestra offers a profound journey through a diverse musical landscape with an array of events that promise to captivate and inspire. From the serene pastures of Beethoven's Sixth Symphony to the dramatic flare of Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony, these concerts explore myriad themes and artistic expressions. With renowned soloists like Ben Goldscheider and Stephen Hough, the season includes everything from classical compositions and film scores to cross-over Broadway favorites. Each concert is a unique experience, weaving narratives that resonate with both the heart and the soul.

An Odyssey of Sound: Exploring the Ulster Orchestra's 2025 Season

Stephen Hough

Jac  Van Steen

Ulster Orchestra

Join the Ulster Orchestra for a performance with their new Principal Guest Artist, the extraordinary clarinettist and conductor Michael Collins. Michael will take on both roles in this concert, which will be a joyous celebration of the wonderful musical connection between him and the Orchestra.

On Your Doorstep: Gentle Echoes

Ardhowen Theatre

The Market Place Theatre & Arts Centre

Theatre At The Mill

Dreams are fleeting, unpredictable and all too prone to turn to nightmare – territory ripe for the imagination of a composer to run riot! This concert starts in the hazy, half-remembered dreams of a slumbering faun in a Mediterranean forest on a sunny afternoon, before Rebecca Clarke’s Viola Sonata takes us to a night where ‘the wine of youth… is fermenting in the veins of God’. That fermentation takes things darker still and we visit the nightmarish world of obsessive desire in Berlioz’s epic, dramatic Symphonie fantastique.

Dreams & Visions

Belfast

Ocean with David Attenborough is a powerful feature documentary from Silverback Films and Open Planet Studios, released globally in May 2025 to coincide with celebrated broadcaster and filmmaker Sir David Attenborough’s 99th birthday. Like all previous Attenborough documentaries, it is jaw dropping in its scope and beauty, yet as the film’s co-director, Toby Nowlan points out, it is not a typical Attenborough film. “This is not about seeing brand new natural history behaviours. It is the greatest message he’s ever told.”

Ocean in Concert

3Arena

Is there a more beautiful violin concerto than Bruch’s? Probably not, especially when it’s played by Elli Choi on her stunning Stradivarius. In Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, colourfully orchestrated by Maurice Ravel, beautiful paintings come to life. This will be a great Sunday morning in the Concertgebouw, Amsterdam, full of the kind of melodies you’ll walk out humming.

Bruch’s Violin Concerto and Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition

The Concertgebouw

Rivers and landscapes shape the course of this programme, which has its source in Spain and flows to Bohemia. The story of Falla’s Three-Cornered Hat centres around a miller, his beautiful wife and the local magistrate, and the music is packed with references to Spanish folk music. Turia is named after the Spanish river that meets the Mediterranean near Valencia, and the solo guitar shimmers and sparkles like sun on the water. From here we move further east and join another river, the Vltava, as it wends its way through Smetana’s beautiful musical depiction of his Bohemian homeland.

Of Rivers & Mountains

Prowl with the tigers, stamp in the snow and hear the desert wind, as well as going on an adventure to find one of the tiniest creatures in the world. Duggee, Bluey, the Octonauts and lots more CBeebies friends invite you and the most unusual animal guests, to join in with music, songs and lots of wildlife fun.

CBeebies Prom: Wildlife Jamboree

Millennium Forum

This Easter, we invite you to join us for a concert of gentleness and reflection. Roxanna Panufnik’s Three Paths To Peace intertwines Christian, Jewish and Islamic music in an uplifting, harmonious whole, while Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending sends a solo violin soaring to stunning heights with a yearning, free-spirited song. Brahms’s beautiful, humane German Requiem is nothing less than the musical equivalent of a friend coming alongside in a time of loss to offer comfort and consolation.

Paths to Peace

Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto is a virtuoso tour de force. Its scale, technical demands and emotional richness are perhaps the ultimate challenge for a pianist to master, but the challenge is worth the prize as the rippling melodies for the soloist are full of melancholy and heart-rending drama. And if Rachmaninoff’s focus is the soloist, then Bartók’s is the orchestra. His concerto ensures that every instrument gets its chance to shine in a piece that embraces vivid colours, gorgeous tunes and ends with a life-affirming, rabble-rousing burst of sheer joy.

A Lifetime for Music

Felix Mendelssohn fell in love with Scotland on holiday and the resulting musical inspiration produced two of his best-known and loved works, the Hebrides Overture and his Third Symphony, nicknamed Scottish. From his depiction of the sea around the coast and even a bit of Hibernian thunder, both evocatively depict the dramatic scenery of Scotland.

On Your Doorstep: Highlands & Fjords

Strule Arts Centre

Guildhall Derry

All the poise, elegance and grace of the Classical period is in this concert – on the surface. But each piece shows its composer in an inventive mood, pushing the boundaries of what was expected and creating something new. Prokofiev imagined how Mozart or Haydn might write in the 1920s and produced his charming First Symphony. Mozart used his Fifth Violin Concerto to play with tempo and style, creating his most brilliant, lyrical and witty writing for the instrument. And Beethoven’s First Symphony contains all the clues required to understand that this was no ordinary composer – he would take the symphony to somewhere entirely new.

Classical Adventures

The past meets the future in bold, unexpected ways. Stravinsky’s Pulcinella transforms the elegance of Baroque music into something sharp, witty, and rhythmically alive, a playful homage viewed through a modern lens. Then, experience the grandeur of Schubert’s Great C Major Symphony, a sweeping, lyrical masterpiece that bridges the Classical and Romantic worlds. Together, these works celebrate tradition not by preserving it, but by reinventing it. Two composers, a century apart, united in their fearless reinvention of tradition.

Reimaginings

Get ready for this epic evening of rock like no other as the Ulster Orchestra and West End singers pay tribute to one of the world’s most iconic and successful rock bands of all time.

Symphonic Queen

Writing in The Guardian, Sir Stephen Hough’s reflections on Brahms’s First Piano Concerto conjure up the fire, intimacy, romance and drama of this phenomenal concerto, one that feels like it contains a whole cosmos in its three movements. It’s paired with a symphony by another composer whose works contain musical universes, Bruckner, as we explore his Symphony No.1.

Flame of Genius

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