The Ulster Orchestra at St Comgall’s Community Hub, Belfast, 6 June 2023

Private piece, no connection to my employer

On the playground sit pensioners and under the sky shines a glass ceiling but today’s game is tag and time is “it”.

For one good hour the string quartet from the Ulster Orchestra holds the audience of, well, Belfast’s newest concert hall in the palm of its hand, only releasing us to applaud each piece in delight before we finally stand for an ovation.

We are taken on a magical mystery tour of popular music, from Adele back to ELO, and around Irish folk ballads and jigs, but there is also Handel’s Water Music and Vaughan Williams’ Lark Ascending, as well as something I could swear they called the Danish Peach Dance.

The Handel, we are told by the violist, was originally written to be performed on barges. Here, in the former primary school on Divis Street, the stage looks quite solid underfoot but the elusive fact is that it floats on a river of dreams because this wonderful venue is the old school courtyard. You cannot sit here long without imagining the rush of little ones around this space when it was still a school a generation ago, open to the Belfast rain.

Like the lark their schooldays have risen and melted into the air of time but you like to imagine that the girls and boys might still live on in the memories of some of the ladies and gentlemen in the audience beneath today’s glass canopy.

Had you never known a school existed here, you could fancy yourself sitting in a cloister somewhere in Spain or France thanks to the arches and pillars that enclose the space, and the great spires of St Peter’s Cathedral you see looming beyond the glass.

If you have not heard of St Comgall’s Community Hub, it’s okay – it has yet to open officially since its grand transformation. We are told it did host the ultimate “cross-community ceilidh” earlier this year – an event attended by not just Catholics and Protestants but Israelis and Palestinians! – but otherwise this is the first concert and who better than the Ulster Orchestra to perform? The orchestra is now a neighbour, having recently moved into a new home on nearby Townsend Street.

I only learnt about the concert by picking up a flyer at Belfast Central Library when I arrived in the city for a visit this week. What was not to like about the promise of a free concert by a great orchestra with refreshments thrown in?

But the journalist inside me was also intrigued by the idea of seeing a new cultural space in west Belfast, with its tragic past during The Troubles and its history of urban deprivation. I had grown up in a peaceful, middle-class part of south Belfast during those awful years and had rarely set foot in the west of the city.

Having never heard of St Comgall’s I was not even sure how to pronounce the name because as I asked my way from Royal Avenue out towards Divis Tower and the Falls Road – my Maps app was playing up – I could swear people called it “St Congles”.

“How to you say the name?” I brightly asked the chap who ushered me in on Tuesday.

“Is it St Com-gall’s or St Con-galls?”

“St Comgall’s.”

“Sorry?”

“St Comgall’s. It depends on your accent, I suppose. Where are you from?”

“South Belfast.”

“Says it all!”

We both laughed and I pressed on none the wiser but as happy as a boy breaking ice on a puddle.