How Music Works: Breathing new life into the National Concert Hall

The National Concert Hall on Earlsfort Terrace in Dublin might look quiet during the day, but there’s usually a good deal of activity going on inside.

Not only is it home to the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, Chamber Choir Ireland, the Irish Baroque Orchestra, Music Network and Music Generation, it is also abuzz with lunchtime concerts, workshops for young people, education and masterclasses in its various rooms and spaces.

Gary Sheehan, head of programme planning in the Concert Hall calls it “a phenomenal machine.”

“If you walk into the auditorium most days, there is an orchestra rehearsing. There are 80 people coming in and out every day.”

The National Concert Hall is an officially-designated ‘National Cultural Institution’, so it is receives its funding from the State. It put on 1,000 events last year. A phenomenal machine indeed.

Though the space is the principal venue for classical music, ever since the former Cork “indie head” Sheehan came to the National Concert Hall role from booking contemporary jazz concerts with Note Productions three years ago, he has been expanding the programme and variety of music on its stages.

“It’s about building new relationships,” Sheehan says. “It had a really great reputation for high-end classical music and traditional music but there were spaces that the hall wasn’t involved in actively. I looked to the Barbican and the Royal Festival Hall in London straight away. Here are two significant, really credible venues who have a significant contemporary programme.”

Making projects
"We do 350 main auditorium shows a year," says Sheehan. We have a venue that has to be commercial – we have targets we have to make to make sure the business as a whole works.

“My job is managing our own programme, managing our relationship with RTÉ – because they have two orchestras here – and manage promoters using the space.”

Sheean’s programming has put an extra emphasis on making the summer more ambitious, and to put on special events in an attempt to “cross-fertilise” audiences along with the existing programme.

Sheehan talks about “making projects” as a goal, and has successfully brought new audiences through the doors via a series like Perspectives which has featured Philip Glass, Nils Frahm, The Punch Brothers and jazz pianist Brad Mehldau.

Once-off events included In Dreams; David Lynch Revisited, a homage to director David Lynch which featured Anna Calvi, Conor O’Brien (Villagers), Mick Harvey (ex-Bad Seeds) and Jehnny Beth of the alt-rock band Savages, further that remit of cross-pollination.

“I don’t think audiences are concerned about genre the way people in the industry are,” suggests Sheehan. “They are interested in exciting quality music. The Gloaming proves that; it’s a trad audience but it’s a bunch of other genres too.”

The rise of The Gloaming
Sheehan's hand in The Gloaming's genesis can be traced back to his his first explorations into trad and jazz while programming music and film events in the old Triskel Arts Centre in Cork and then Note Productions when he paired Iarla O' Lionaird up with English composer Gavin Bryars, and Martin Hayes with jazz guitarist Bill Frisell.

“Martin has this transcendent improvising thing that could be Brad Meldau,” says Sheehan glowingly.

Last week, The Gloaming played five nights in the main auditorium before their new second album went to number one in the Irish album charts. Sheehan was there when the band first formed as an idea, in a New-York diner, and later went on to manage the band until the concert hall came calling. The five-night run confirms that exciting quality music is key.

“It has been a big moment in Irish music,” says Sheehan. There’s something in what they’re doing that is about Irish music having confidence in itself; that it isn’t reliant on British music journalists to say it’s great for it to develop.”

Sheehan goes on to namecheck the Dublin record label Ergodos and its composers, Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh’s solo work, the new trad band Lynched. James Vincent McMorrow and Jape as examples of Irish musicians doing interesting work.

Songwriting residencies
In fact, Sheehan has inserted himself as a facilitator of Irish songwriting in role at the concert hall by introducing a residency idea for Irish songwriters and musicians. The hall already is home to two National Orchestras and the Chamber Choir Ireland, but Sheehan has also looked beyond the classical world.

Over the last few of years, more rock and alternative-leaning artists such as Bell X1’s Paul Noonan, Ross Turner (I Am The Cosmos), Cathy Davey, Neil Hannon, Glenn Keating and McMorrow were given a space to write upstairs in the concert hall.

“What were interested in is connecting the hall more deeply with music-making in Ireland,” says Sheehan. “It was about bringing artists of different kinds into the hall and seeing what happens in that organic way that people meet.

“That’s lead to Paul [Noonan] bringing the Printer Clips here, Ross Turner has recorded a bunch of interesting contemporary singer-songwriters, ensembles, contemporary classical people in a project that will hopefully see the light of day soon. Unexpected things have happened. Paul Noonan ended up collaborating with members of the Symphony.”

Relationships, not money
"A lot of it is about relationships, not money," he says. |If you can get on well with managers, agents, artists, and understand the longer-term arc with an artist, you can make some very special things happen."

He cites his conversations with American jazz pianist Brad Mehldau’s booking agency as an example of longer-term thinking in programming as opposed to what gig is next in the short-term.

“They were always talking about the four year plan for the artist. Every time we were talking about what we could do, it was always about where the artist was heading.”

It seems to be working. New audiences are coming to the concert hall all the time and the ones shifting tickets might be surprising to some people.

I suggest that streaming services may be helping a savvy audience connect the dots and explore contemporary music more deeply than before.

“It’s hard to track but instinct is telling me that the people who are listening to Nils Frahm are aware of Philip Glass,” says Sheehan. “They hear he’s the minimalist godfather guy and they delve back.”

In May, the contemporary minimal composer Max Richter will perform with an ensemble. He will be playing extracts from Sleep, an eight-hour piece of music intended to send the listener to dreamland. Sheehan says the show is about to sell out.

“1200 tickets for a minimal contemporary composer? There is a remarkable thing there.”

For more, see nch.ie