High and low notes of a decidedly mixed bag

Michael Dervan looks back on a year in music that delivered great successes from some but disappointments from others

Arts Council cutbacks or not, it's largely been a year of consolidation for music in Ireland. In part, that's a reflection of the fact that neither of the country's largest musical institutions, RTÉ and the National Concert Hall, is dependent on Arts Council grants.

Back in 1998, RTÉ's incoming director of music, Niall Doyle, hardly imagined the crises he would live through as the national broadcaster struggled with political and commercial pressures. Doyle's strength is in the management rather than the artistic end of his brief, and the music division at RTÉ has benefited from his steady hand.

This year the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra completed its solid Bruckner cycle under principal conductor Gerhard Markson, offered the Irish première of Charles Ives's ground-breaking Fourth Symphony during its American Originals weekend (again under Markson) and went on its first US tour. "Irish Visitors (Some Even From Ireland)" ran the headline of the New York Times review, elaborating on critic Anthony Tommasini's comment on the "culturally diverse roster of players".

The indication that there's lots of work yet to be done to reach the international standards the orchestra aspires to is clear from the review's final paragraph: "The concert concluded with a rigorous performance of Brahms's First Symphony that showcased the orchestra's rich and dusky-toned string section. If there was some occasional clattering among the winds and some shaky moments for the brass, this was still a bracing, fresh account of a repertory staple."

This contrasts sharply with the New York Times's less qualified responses to other international visitors in January. The Budapest Festival orchestra provoked the description "big, strong and beautiful", and the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra was felt to be "a fine orchestra (one of several there) with skilled, enthusiastic and noticeably young players, and a dynamic, technically formidable conductor, Jukka-Pekka Saraste".

The impact of an individual conductor is something to be reckoned with, as William Eddins has shown with the NSO. His handling of Rachmaninov's Second Piano Concerto with Nikolai Demidenko was the peak of his work this year. And the début of the Frenchman Laurent Wagner as principal conductor of the RTÉ Concert Orchestra demonstrated what a quantum leap the right man in the right place can achieve.

Programming is going to be one of the major issues for him in Ireland, and the repertoire of his forthcoming Viennese series at the Helix shows his willingness to deal with the knottier areas of the 20th century as well as the familiar classics. Doyle vetoed Wagner's idea of performing Mahler's Fourth Symphony. Let's hope this short-sighted decision is not going to indicate a favourite-child scenario in which some of the juiciest parts of the overlapping repertoire of RTÉ's two orchestras is reserved for the NSO.

The RTÉ Concert Orchestra now has one major advantage over the NSO: it plays in the acoustically superior Mahony Hall at the Helix. As a new venue, unsubsidised by the Arts Council, the Helix has faced an uphill battle, but Nick Reed, its director, has been fighting the good fight and bringing in a range of visiting orchestras and opera companies.

The Irish Chamber Orchestra brought its all-Vivaldi programme with Nigel Kennedy to a capacity crowd at the Helix rather than the National Concert Hall, and both halls had an interesting array of young solo talent during the year, Freddy Kempf (at the Helix) and Helen Huang (at the NCH) showing very different approaches to Mozart piano concertos and Hilary Hahn offering an impeccably poised Stravinsky Violin Concerto (at the NCH).

It's been another good year for the National Chamber Choir under Celso Antunes, who's shown the welcome and unselfish generosity of bringing in a roster of first-rate guest conductors. The choir has the advantage of a repertoire that extends back centuries beyond what's available to any orchestra, and Antunes has been exploiting its potential to the full.

The AXA Dublin International Piano Competition also ultimately had a good year. Antti Siirala, the Finn who took the top prize and won the hearts of his audience too, subjected the competition to the blow of entering for the Leeds Competition. The AXA likes to boast about its high standing, but a question remains: if the Dublin competition is so important, why would its winner need to test himself at Leeds as well? But then Siirala diminished the embarrassment by taking the top prize at Leeds, and followed up with a recital in Galway that confirmed the depth of his achievements, both musical and technical.

It's actually been quite a good year for opera, though not for Opera Ireland. Opera Theatre Company offered two full-length works by Irish composers, Ian Wilson's Hamelin and Jürgen Simpson's lower-aiming, higher-achieving Thwaite. Wexford Festival Opera scored a hit with Weinberger's Schwanda The Bagpiper in its original Czech version, Svanda Dudák, although the potential of its other two works was rather vitiated by the productions.

The ongoing use of an orchestra from Belarus provoked a much-publicised protest from the Musicians Union of Ireland. It's hard to see how, in the long term, Wexford can continue to lay a claim on the taxpayers' purse if it continues to sideline Irish talent.

Opera Ireland ended the year with its credibility in tatters. The "spectacular" concert performance of Don Giovanni in April was the nadir of a company that has so seriously lost the plot that the value of its existence has to be brought into question. The deplorable Arts Council cuts, real as they were, were only a convenient smokescreen for a company whose financial-management woes and delivery failures long predate the Government's rough treatment of the Arts Council.

Another nadir was reached by the Veronica Dunne European Union Singing Competition, where the standard dropped to a shocking low. The event's organisers singularly failed to motivate the best of European talent to enter.

Still on singing, Cecilia Bartoli usefully threw her megastar weight behind the cause of Antonio Salieri, with an uncanny mixture of vocal, musical and commercial success. The Ulster Youth Choir under Christopher Bell offered fresh-voiced pleasure in a challenging contemporary programme at the National Gallery of Ireland with confidence and freedom. And the resuscitation of the Sligo New Music Festival was a hit, with artistic director Ian Wilson presenting a rewarding portrait of the leading Italian composer Salvatore Sciarrino.