Players’ fears mount after this year’s touring programme of the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra is effectively shut down due to station cutbacks
THE RTÉ announcement was curt. “Due to further budget cuts, the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra’s April tour to Galway, Limerick and Cork with pianist Barry Douglas, scheduled to take place on April 12th, 13th and 14th, and A Musical Adventure: A Family Concert for Young Children, scheduled to take place on May 27th at the National Concert Hall, will now not take place.” Séamus Crimmins, executive director of RTÉ’s performing groups, said that the concerts were cancelled “with great regret” but that the cancellations were “necessary and unavoidable in the current economic climate”.
The loss is significant, as it is effectively the shut-down of the orchestra’s touring programme for 2012. The orchestra had for many years toured twice a year. But cutbacks in 2009 saw a reduction to a single tour. That has now been dropped.
The Con Brio Sligo Music Association, run by the doughty Luisa McConville, is still flying the flag, and will, at its own risk, be bringing the orchestra to the northwest on April 21st, for performances of Elgar’s Cello Concerto (with soloist Gautier Capuçon) and Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony under Paul McCreesh. But one concert is hardly enough to justify the notion that the orchestra serves a national remit.
Yes, it’s true that the orchestra’s work is broadcast weekly to an audience large enough to fill a sports stadium. But that was true also when it was a radio orchestra and its programming was the responsibility of a radio producer.
The orchestra’s current status dates from 1990, when the RTÉ Symphony Orchestra became the National Symphony Orchestra – it was later branded the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland before becoming the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra. It was in July 1989 that Kevin Healy, then RTÉ’s director of radio programming, announced 22 new positions bring its playing strength to 93 and described the expansion as “the most significant event in Irish orchestral activity since the establishment of the Symphony Orchestra in 1946”. He also described the move as “a substantial indication of RTÉ’s determination to fulfil its public-service obligations”.
The orchestra’s then general manager Gareth Hudson spoke of more tours and said his main priority would be “to ensure that the next generation of Irish orchestral musicians is identified and encouraged to seek work on a realistic contractual basis with the national symphony orchestra”. The plans unravelled as RTÉ struggled with the extraordinary, revenue-constricting Broadcasting Act 1990. The orchestra was not expanded, nor was the level of touring that Healy and Hudson were talking of ever achieved.
After the appointment of Niall Doyle to head the RTÉ music groups in 1998, things looked up. He restructured the music division and once unimaginable projects – including a complete cycle of the Mahler symphonies – were delivered.
The question now is whether or not the orchestra remains in a position to be the kind of national provider of orchestral music that was promised all those years ago.
The rumour mill is alive with speculation – that players will be let go, that the 2012-13 season will be heavily cut back, that the orchestra is struggling to hire conductors and soloists for its programme of summer activity in the face of a cut of €1 million in its budget. And, given the swingeing cuts that are being imposed in other areas of activity by the national broadcaster, it has to be expected that the performing groups, which have already experience significant cuts, will continue to take their share of the pain.
RTÉ is in the unusual position for a national broadcaster of having a monopoly over locally supplied symphonic repertoire. There is no other comparable European capital where such a situation prevails. European countries with similar populations, such as Denmark and Finland, not only have a choice of full-size orchestras in the capital, but also a range of orchestras based in regional cities as well as orchestras whose primary function is to play for opera and ballet.
RTÉ’s orchestral monopoly puts it in a position not unlike those once held by Aer Lingus, Eircom and the ESB. Those monopolies, which seemed natural and inevitable for so long, look extremely unhealthy in retrospect. But in relation to symphony orchestras, we’ve never managed to move on from the monopoly situation. The reason why was last explored when President Michael D Higgins was arts minister, and set up a review group with the acronym Piano.
The group’s first recommendation ran: “The NSO should be established by law under an independent board answerable directly to the Minister for Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht.” It also recommended that “the licence fee should continue to be the primary source of funding”, but that in the long term “the NSO should be funded directly by the Government”.
However, experience dictates that the most likely outcome of RTÉ’s current travails will not so much be a development of a new model, but a chipping away at the model that already exists.
The most exciting orchestral event of the past week came from neither of the RTÉ orchestras. It came instead from the Orchestre du Capitole de Toulouse(NCH, Monday), making its Irish debut under its dynamic young music director Tugan Sokhiev.
If you wanted a lesson in why musical history could be usefully divided into pre- and post-Berlioz periods, Sokhiev’s account of the composer’s Symphonie fantastique would have given you all the evidence. Berlioz conceived orchestral music with a precision and imagination, with a sensibility to orchestral tone and colour that were entirely new. And Sokhiev gloried in the effects and sonorities, making the instrumental combinations glow and growl and bulge and explode with unrestrained energy and freshness. He offered bold heart-stirringly romantic music-making that was overwhelming in its immediacy. The Toulouse players also offered a gorgeously rounded and honeyed account of Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, and Alina Ibragimova was the nimble, highly-charged soloist in Saint-Saëns’s Third Violin Concerto.
The RTÉ Concert Orchestra's principal guest conductor John Wilson can be relied upon to raise the quality of the orchestra's playing every time. His performance of Rimsky-Korsakov's Sheherazade(NCH, Thursday) took his fondness for fullness of effect too far, so that the insistence became rather like being hit on the head again and again. The evening's big showpiece turned out to be Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto, where Andrew Haveron's daring speeds and extreme individuality ensured that there was never a dull moment.
The RTÉ NSO's principal guest conductor Hannu Lintu also seems to like pushing players to the limits musically. Sometimes, as in Lutoslawski's Concerto for Orchestra(NCH, Friday), he spends so much time gunning for the big effects that you almost wish he would relax and let the music flex more freely.
He was sensitive to Angela Hewitt’s slightly understated approach to Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G, and lucid in presenting Matthias Pintscher’s Towards Osiris, one of a number of “asteroids” commissioned for Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic as companion pieces to Holst’s Planets.
