Prelude to an orchestral renaissance?

THE PIANO report is finally upon us, more than a year after it was originally promised. During the latter days of what felt like a long wait, the safe money has been on the side of a recommendation to take the National Symphony Orchestra out of RTE. However, the first of the report's 23 recommendations dealing with RTE's performing groups goes rather further than might have been expected.

"The NSO," it reads, "should be established by law under an independent board answerable directly to the Minister for Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht." On top of this in the short term, "the licence fee should continue to be the primary source of funding," and, additionally, there is a call for Broadcasting Authority Act to be amended "to require that RTE adequately maintain and support the RTECO and the RTE String Quartet".

The report calls for "a radically new working arrangement" and "a mission statement" for both orchestras. It recommends the RTE Chamber Choir to be subsumed into the National Chamber Choir (the breakaway group formed in response to the music cuts of 1990 and for the currently director less RTE Philharmonic Choir to be placed under the new NSO board and renamed the National Philhariponic Choir. Small wonder, then, that RTE's corporate response has been the expression of "grave concern", and that at the launch of the report on Monday, RTE's director of radio, Kevin Healy, would add no comment to the station's official printed statement.

"RTE," this statement says, "wajits all of the groups to flourish within RTE and to continue their tradition of service to broadcastjng and to the musical life of Ireland. RTE will give detailed consideration to the report and to the many interesting recommendations which it makes. We will look at ways in which the role of the performing groups in broadcasting and otherwise can be strengthened and enhanced while remaining as an integral part of the national broadcasting service."

This, mind you, is the same RTE which only a few years ago disbanded the RTE Chamber Choir, threatened the RTECO with abolition, drastically curtailed its support of the RTE Vanbrugh String Quartet, and reneged on its commitment (promised for January 1990 but yet to be honoured) to expand the NSO to a complement of 93 players.

To be fair to RTE, it has to be acknowledged that the funding problems it faced in the early 1990s were not of its own making but the result of draconian legislation introduced by an unsympathetic government. But it is surely the very nature of RTE's response, at such a critical juncture, which lies at the root of the current reappraisal of its role as the sanctuary for national musical resources. This role is unique to it in this country.

It is not the norm for national broadcasting services to be the sole supporter of large scale orchestral activity in European capital cities. RTE's uniqueness in this respect adds to its burden of responsibility, and, well intentioned or no, it is widely felt that the station has not been handling this responsibility in a confidence inspiring manner. Unfortunately for RTE, the laudable aspirations of its corporate response (as also the PIANO recommendations which are the cause of its "grave concern") will be scrutinised in the light of its track record in recent years.

Questions and answers

READING the finished report, two questions raised by PIANO member John Horgan (at one of the review body's public forums) kept coming to mind. "We need to decide who gets most from this relationship, RTE or the orchestra?" he asked and also "Would RTE be prepared to fund it but not run it?" The report now leaves one in no doubt about PIANO's own answers, though, naturally, serious consideration has been given to protecting some of RTE's musical interests.

RTE would control three seats on the new 16 member board, and "should agree" to broadcast "a substantial proportion" of the orchestra's work, for which the orchestra would receive no additional fees. In other words, the PIANO plan is for, a balance in the new relationship, with RTE retaining access to the orchestral resource it has most need of (the broadcast performances) and the orchestra, in turn, retaining access to the RTE resource it has most need of(money).

The musicians' personal concerns which, it is made clear, may well involve redundancy or redeployment for players reluctant to leave RTE have also been addressed, though it will hardly have gone down well in Montrose that PIANO expects RTE to foot this particular bill.

Yet, with a review of broadcasting legislation currently underway, and the lure of a significant revivification of the NSO outside of RTE at no immediate cost to the Exchequer, PIANO's most far reaching proposals, which would have been unthinkable only a few years ago, will be taken very seriously indeed by all the concerned parties.

The recommendations for the RTE Concert Orchestra are hardly less radical. Eleven new posts are envisaged for this orchestra. The general points about improved remuneration in tandem with greater flexibility of work practices and "the special employment requirements and lifetime work patterns of musicians" are reiterated, and the orchestra's own call for a new rehearsal venue strongly supported "Studio 1 in the RTE Radio building is not suitable and its use should be discontinued as soon as possible."

The PIANO report ranges far and wide in its consideration of the RTE performing groups, from the detailed constitution of a new NSO board and new management structures for the two orchestras to details of "named posts" (essentially the creation of a greater number of higher grade posts within the orchestras), national and international touring, commercial recording, the employment of composers in association and so on down the line.

More's the pity, then, that some of the figures in the document don't seem to add up to compatible totals. On the one hand, the report estimates from figures supplied by RTE in the NSO's 1994 Income and Expenditure Account that the total cost of running the orchestra is £4.5 million. Yet, on a later page, tile "grand total" of the 1995 budget for all RTE music groups is given as £5.18 million, a full £2.17 million of which is not attributable to the NSO. PIANO's prudent decision was to cost its proposals on the more expensive option, but the contradictions here exposed suggest that an external audit may be required to establish the true situation.

Impassioned plea for education

ONE of the factors which delayed publication of the report was the decision to interpret the original brief with a considerable degree of latitude. And, as the foreword explains, "the underlying worry of the majority of submissions was the lack of widespread music education in the country."

The report's most eloquent and impassioned pleading is in the section on music in primary education. It describes "a vicious circle no music in the primary school leads to nothing to build on at secondary level musically illiterate students entering the colleges of education become graduates with very little musical knowledge. (This is in no way a reflection on the teachers, but on the system.) Then the whole cycle begins again.

The conclusion, indisputable, it seems to me, is that "if music education is to be taken seriously, the Department of Education must sanction the employment of specialist music teachers." And the fact that "PIANO has been unable to find any publicly funded music school north of a line from Ennis to Dublin" provoked the Minister for Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht, Michael D. Higgins, to a fully justified paroxysm about lack of "national self respect" in his speech at the launch of the report.

PIANO supports the concept of a conservatoire level institution based in Earlsfort Terrace and called the Irish Academy for the Performing Arts (could it possibly be that the review body's crusading chairman, John O'Conor, might be envisaging heading this, too?). It takes up the cudgels on behalf of professional solo performers (who, admittedly get a particularly rough deal in Ireland), and even finds space to lament the limited extent of informed and constructive music criticism in the media.

On a more positive note, the report welcomes the expanding work of the Music Net Work and the establishment in Limerick of the Irish Chamber Orchestra and envisages the creation of professional chamber ensembles based in Sligo and Galway as the prelude to the establishment of schools of music in those centres.

Some of the woolliest thinking is to be found in the area of opera (the mere mention of the ICO, with just 13 members, in the context of servicing the Wexford Festival is more than faintly ludicrous). Launching the idea of a "music theatre" for Dublin while invoking mystifying comparisons with 400 seat venues, which could hardly accommodate opera on a viable basis, is bound to cloud the very real issues at stake.

These and other vagueness, I imagine, can be interpreted as a guide as to what is at the core of this report and what is on its periphery. Prolonged musical management failures in RTE have profoundly shaken public confidence. The PIANO report charts a possible way forward out of the difficulties. It's one that, in spite of apparent loss of lace, to RTE, should secure access for the station to improved standards of orchestral performance. And, with a bit of luck, it could see Dubliners encountering the sort of orchestral renaissance that has taken place in cities as diverse as Birmingham, Oslo and Sydney.