大象传媒

You've got to hand it to Belfast Festival at Queen's; they think outside the box when it comes to venues. What could have been a miserably cold night huddled on the grass in Botanic Gardens, turned into "An Event", sitting on bleachers in a circus tent festooned with stars.

Liam 脫 Maonla铆 took to the stage for a couple of songs to get us warmed up. Literally, a couple of songs. Precisely two. It falls into the dangerously-titled genre of easy-listening, but let's not forget that such music is named because it is easy to listen to. Liam - perhaps best-known for being a member of The Hothouse Flowers and interestingly being in the first incarnation of the band that later became My Bloody Valentine - stares at his fingers while he plays, pausing at times, giving the illusion that he is creating the music while we watch. He seems lost in his own world, but not in a way that disengages with the audience - he simply possesses nobility that commands an audience and doesn't beg for their approval.

Ursula Burns is here to showcase her fourth album 'Deep In The Dreaming' and she does this finely, weaving tales of the creation of the album together with songs from it. She calls it a Winter album and it undoubtedly is. From her show opener 'November Snow', to delicate beauties like 'Like Feathers Floating', the cascading individual piano notes recall raindrops, or footsteps in snow. It seems to represent the vulnerability that we all feel in Winter.

Burns' voice admittedly is an acquired taste. It's unusual to hear a female voice with such maturity on the local scene, especially in this world of ever-younger popstars. Her voice can tell a story though, and these are powerful personal stories. Additional vocals are provided by Ciara O'Neill of Kitty and the Can Openers, and while she can sometimes be accused of overly-sanitised vocals in a solo setting, singing backing to Ursula she provides a fittingly ethereal after-echo, at times almost indistinguishable from the sounds of ye olde woodwind on display, and a perfect match for the Celtic choral sensibilities here.

As Ursula moves from piano to harp - one of two harps onstage - you begin to realise that this isn't about the real world. She sings 'Fairyland' and we see that the delicacy of the music, the circus tent setting, the female harmonies and the haunting old-fashionedness of the lyrics combine to take us to a place where anything can happen. Music is above all things an escape. Burns provides this in spades.

The show closes with 'Mechanical Toys', a song she wrote for 'Leon and the Space Between' [itself a Belfast Festival at Queen's favourite] and a song that sums up the entire evening. Bittersweet and heartbreaking, the chorus about believing in magic makes us want to clap our hands like Peter Pan and cry "We do believe in fairies! We do, we do, we do!"

Who needs the real world anyway?

Elizabeth McGeown