Peter Sweeney is known for his flamboyant organ recitals. Now he's using his showmanship to promote DIT's place in the hierarchy of music schools, writes Arminta Wallace.
'The Italians know how to create excitement," declares Peter Sweeney. Sure they do. Puccini, Verdi, all that stuff. But Sweeney isn't talking about music. He's talking about cars. "Well, I'm not really a musician. I'm only an organist," he says, by way of explanation. An organist with an Alfa Romeo? He tries to look abashed - and fails. "Up to yesterday I didn't have a car," he says. "But I went and bought myself the most gorgeous dark-blue Alfa Romeo. It sounds slightly pretentious to be talking about loving Alfa Romeos, but I actually do. Imagine putting the exhaust pipe upside down, so that you hear" - he executes a note-perfect sports-engine rummmmm - "instead of . . ." An ordinary saloon-style purr.
In musical terms Sweeney has been taking the Alfa Romeo approach for years. If his organ recitals are well known for their flamboyance, his teaching style appears to be similarly high-powered. About two hours before our conversation he has told a presumably goggle-eyed group of first-year students at Dublin Institute of Technology's conservatory of music and drama that he could increase their powers of concentration, and so improve the outcome of their practice time, by 100 per cent - via one simple exercise. "Well, I wasn't going to tell them I could teach them to sight-sing," he says. "All I can do is teach them how to learn sight-singing. So I began with the psychology of learning. You could have heard a pin drop, though, all the same."
Sweeney maintains that the standard of teaching at the conservatory is second to none - and he is applying his formidable energies to bringing this fact to the attention of the wider world. "We don't want to knock, or detract in any way from, what John O'Conor has achieved at the Royal Irish Academy of Music," he says. "We just want to put our heads above the parapet and say: 'Look, we're here, and we're good.' " To show just how good, Sweeney organised a recital last Thursday by conservatory teachers at the National Concert Hall. It was, he hopes, the first of a series of five annual events. Why? "To show the world what a wonderful teaching staff we have," he says. "The end result of teaching is often performance, and this is a way of stating publicly that we have some serious performers teaching at DIT."
The concert featured 15-minute programmes from five of the teaching staff: the soprano Regina Nathan, the violinist Michael d'Arcy, the guitarist John Feeley, the pianist Roy Holmes and Sweeney himself. "I managed to get sponsorship from Smart Telecom," says Sweeney, "by virtue of the fact that I know the chief executive, Oisin Fanning - I taught his wife piano years ago. And they've been fantastic sponsors."
Lyric FM agreed to broadcast the performance and provided a presenter, in the shape of Carl Corcoran. DIT's weekly lunchtime recitals are broadcast by Lyric regularly, thanks to another coup by the indefatigable Sweeney. "When I asked whether they could be broadcast I was told there was a shortage of outside-broadcast units," he says. "Then I remembered that actually we're a college of technology, so I asked our top technical people if they could record the concerts and send them down the line to Lyric, so to speak. And they do." This people-centred approach is typical of Sweeney, whose conversation is peppered by references to friends of friends, relatives of friends and friends of relatives. When he went to Geneva to pursue his organ studies, his first wife's brother, a cellist in the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, managed to get them an apartment at a reasonable rent. Before that again, Sweeney was a member of an early-music ensemble known as the Consort of St Sepulchre, remembered with fondness by Irish concert-goers of a certain vintage.
"Gosh, that was a long time ago," says Sweeney, putting his feet up on the custom-built kitchen table of his stunning house, which has been used as the set for advertisements, fashion shoots and Gerry Stembridge's film About Adam. "Barra Boydell, son of Brian, and Andrew Robinson - who teaches at DIT, actually - got together and planned a series of medieval and Renaissance programmes. Their researches were mostly done at Marsh's Library, beside St Patrick's Cathedral, which is the library of St Sepulchre; hence the title of the group. At that time Andrew was married to Jenny, and I to Jenny's sister Vanessa. They called in Anthony O'Brien, who now makes instruments, and David Milne, who is director of music at Kilkenny College, and his brother John. And Lucienne O'Kelly, who was married to Fachtna, manager of the Boomtown Rats.
"We got a medieval-dance teacher to show us how to do the dances, and we gave fully costumed concerts around the country. We got as far as fronting for the Chieftains. Then I left to go to Geneva. But I notice over the past couple of years that the group has regrouped and is giving concerts at, for example, Sligo Early Music Festival." The consort was, he says, way ahead of its time. "Even today you're not exactly inundated by groups who do medieval music. Well, not in Ireland anyway. In London there are lots of them. My son, being a professional theorbo player, works with them all the time. He often phones and says things like: 'I had to wear the most extraordinary doublet and hose get-up today while struggling through Hyde Park in the rain.' And of course his girlfriend, Hannah, who is half Swedish and half Hungarian, is a freelance violinist who plays with Harry Christophers and The Sixteen . . ." Here we go again with the musical dynasties. Sweeney chuckles. "Musicians tend to meet socially, you see," he says. "And there are interesting psychological ramifications there. If you meet somebody at a gig, there's already an extremely highly charged emotional atmosphere. Also, if you're a performer and you're performing properly, you're baring all every time you get up there."
Which reminds him. The final piece on the programme for the DIT showcase concert was a transcription by Graham Ashton - "who made a fortune writing music for the James Bond movies" - of Mussorgsky's Great Gate of Kiev, from Pictures at an Exhibition, for organ, seven brass players and percussion. The percussionist was Noel Eccles, of Riverdance fame; the organist, of course, was Sweeney. It's the sort of piece that makes "highly charged" sound like an understatement.
At the time of our interview, Sweeney still hadn't seen the score, and he was trying his best to look apprehensive. But he had that Alfa Romeo glint in his eye.
A new season of lunchtime concerts at DIT begins on Wednesday, November 2nd. They will be broadcast on Lyric FM on Sunday afternoons