{TABLE} Waterfront Fanfares ................ Philip Hammond Dance Episodes from Rodeo .......... Copland Irish Vapours and Capers ........... Lorin Maazel Piano Concerto No 5 (Emperor) ...... Beethoven {/TABLE} THE opening concert of the Belfast Waterfront Hall was one of those gala occasions on which musical concerns could be seen to take second place to issues of populism and personality.

The Ulster Orchestra's inaugural programme did little to play to the orchestra's strengths, and its two encounters with contemporary composition were both low of aim and even lower of achievement.

To be fair, fanfares for public occasions must be among the most awkward of challenges for a contemporary composer. Philip Hammond's decision was to stick close to his not very striking opening riff and stay with it too long.

The Irish Vapours and Capers by Lorin Maazel (yes, the Maazel who's best known as a conductor) was included at the behest of flautist James Galway, for whom it was written. In addition to solo flute, Maazel calls for no less than two narrators to speak a string of texts like I'll Tell Me Ma, Molly Malone or Danny Boy (typically over a humdrum background) in advance of more elaborate settings to show off the incontestably scintillating flute playing of which Galway is capable.

I can't imagine that there's an Irish composer alive who would happily put his or her name to such a farrago, which would stand in immediate contention for one of 10 worst pieces of music I've ever been called upon to review.

It fell to pianist Barry Douglas in Beethoven's Emperor Concerto to bring a sense of real musical substance to the evening. Douglas here was robust and forthright, a little too hasty in the opening flourishes, perhaps, and, in spite of the evident force of his playing.

It was in this work that some limitations in the new hall's acoustic were clearly to be observed. The sound from my seat in Block U (slightly in front of the stage on the left, looking down over the pianist's shoulders) was lively, full at the bass end, a bit thinner on top, but with a noticeable loss of focus except in the quietest passages.

Douglas's first solo encore, a high wire reading of Liszt's Rigoletto Paraphrase, confirmed these impressions, though with just a single instrument the impairment of clarity was not so extreme. It may be that advance reports created too great a sense of anticipation about the musical qualities of the new hall, but Belfast's Ulster Hall sets a high standard to match in terms of an enhancing acoustic for orchetral music.