A new tune for an old establishment

The National Concert Hall's new chief executive wants a recital hall, a rethink of the concert programme and will oversee an update of the venue, writes MICHAEL DERVAN

THE NEW chief executive of the National Concert Hall, Simon Taylor, has worked in Dublin, Belfast and Bournemouth. In Dublin he was a freelance guitarist, artistic director of the Dublin International Guitar Festival, and administrator of the Newpark Music Centre. He joined RTÉ in 1990 as administrator of the RTÉ Concert Orchestra and quickly rose to become general manager of RTÉ’s orchestras and performing groups.

The early 1990s were difficult in RTÉ, first because of cutbacks imposed through the Broadcasting Act 1990 and a series of what you might call Gubu happenings in the music department. The RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet was almost stood down. A cost-saving attempt to merge the symphony and concert orchestras for particular projects resulted in industrial action. The NSO's first principal conductor resigned. His immediate successor never took up his position because of a row over contract details. The Piano Report, prepared by a ministerial review group, even recommended the removal of the symphony orchestra from RTÉ, and its establishment under an independent board.

Taylor clearly knows what it is to be in some serious wars, laughing wryly as he recalls those years. “To describe it as a learning curve is perhaps an underestimate.” He’s still proud of “finally getting the two orchestras on record, as it were, in the deal we did with Naxos”, and points to the national broadcaster’s early support for the West Cork Chamber Music Festival as another positive development.

From his time in Belfast, where he worked for six years as senior music producer at the BBC, he has fond memories of the adventurous programming for an annual series of summer concerts with the Ulster Orchestra, and of making radio documentaries with Colm Tóibín in Spain, and on the great guitarist Segovia with the writer Louis de Bernières, “who’s also a keen amateur guitarist”.

He became chief executive of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra in 2008, an orchestra that is not just a resident orchestra for the city, but effectively for the south and southwest of England. It is, he says, “a huge territory, probably about the same size as Ireland”, with all that involves in terms of touring (to Poole, Exeter, Bristol, Portsmouth and Cheltenham) as well as managing relationships with a multiplicity of now hard-hit local authority funders, along with the similarly strapped Arts Council of England.

The British economy may not be the basket case the Irish economy is but, as Taylor puts it, “the environment for arts funding is difficult”.

He never imagined staying away from Dublin forever, and when he was asked to apply for the NCH job he felt the time was right for a return. He’s 55 and was well aware that this job opportunity might never present itself again.

In spite of all the gloom, he sees the NCH as offering “an opportunity to really make a difference, to make an impression. I know the big plan for the redevelopment of the hall had to be shelved but there are plans for the development of a recital space, and the refurbishment of the main hall.” And now that the complex has been bought by the state from UCD, there’s a lot of space awaiting new uses.

“I had a look around this morning at areas of the building that I’d never seen before. And the potential for doing something remarkable here is absolutely enormous. What that opens up in how you might programme, what connections you might make with other art forms and things like that, is really fascinating.”

Most events in the NCH’s main auditorium are presented by outside promoters; RTÉ with its two orchestras and other performing groups being the most active. Taken together, the hall’s own 2011-12 International Concert Series and its series of concerts celebrating its 30th anniversary come to 20 events. So it’s not the chief executive of the hall, or its board, who make the choices that dominate activity.

“That’s a key issue. It’s probably too early for me to make any specific statements about that . . . Inevitably, with any hall, there is that argument about to what extent is it a curatorial role, or is it simply a space that people come and hire? There’s a balance, obviously, from a commercial perspective. You need to have that business coming in. But I would like to see a little bit more of the curatorial approach: bringing strands together in a way that presents something that’s, if you like, greater than the sum of the parts.

“The connection with RTÉ is vital. That is a huge part of the programming of the hall and obviously that’s for RTÉ to look after primarily. But I would like to have conversations with RTÉ very early on in that planning process as to what they are looking at, what they are doing, and how the hall might be able to complement it in some way.”

He would like to embrace other promoters in a similar process, perhaps creating bigger strands of programming. And he’s keen to emphasise “the national role of the hall as being the place that presents the very best of Irish music-making. That’s a critical balance, to try and get that right, to use the resources in a way that reflect that fairly.”

Given the potential he sees in the building, he would like to explore “connections with other national institutions, other art forms. And to look at the role of the education and community and outreach side.” He also declares that “being supportive of new music is absolutely vital” and says “we cannot be just a museum of music written pre-20th century”.

He’s also aware of how musicians are encouraged and nurtured when they are promising students – the NCH presents an annual Rising Star recital – only to find themselves effectively ignored unless they manage to achieve a particular degree of celebrity status. It’s an industry-wide phenomenon, he says.

The main hall, which wasn’t state of the art even in 1981, needs refurbishing. The backstage areas are particularly limited. “When I was running the orchestras in RTÉ,” says Taylor, “I was familiar with those arguments from the other side of the fence.” And when it comes to the acoustic, he says, “my understanding is that when the hall was first converted, that work was not completed”.

The NCH’s ambition is to bring the main hall and backstage areas up to 21st century standards, to create a recital hall (“one of the great lacks in Dublin is a good recital space, a good, 500-seat hall”) and to provide a separate rehearsal space for the RTÉ NSO. A recital hall was part of the original plan for the venue, and it is shown in a book by the hall’s original acoustic consultant, Vilhelm Lassen Jordan. The use of the main hall for orchestral rehearsals precludes any other weekday use of the hall until the late afternoon.

Freeing up the main auditorium will also help the NCH cope with competition from the Grand Canal Theatre and Convention Centre. These make it important “that the hall keeps being seen as an exciting and vibrant place. Perhaps one needs to change things a little bit in order to make people sit up and take notice, so that it’s not just, year by year, the same sort of format but something that people see as pushing the boat out a little bit.

“There is a perception that some of the programming had got samey, that it is time for refreshment. I don’t mean that to take away in any way from my predecessor here [Judith Woodworth], who did a fantastic job, who really did put the hall on the map. Inevitably, a different person comes in and would like to do things in a different way. The most important thing for any venue is a real sense of public buy-in, a real sense of public support.”

He harks back to his experience in the UK, where “there were a lot of cuts in the arts. Obviously there were a lot of complaints from the arts community about that, but hardly a great public outcry.” He contrasts this with the proposal to sell off the national woodlands, which occasioned “a massive campaign and a government U-turn”.

He wants that level of public support for the arts and for music “so that it would be just inconceivable for there not to be a national concert hall, inconceivable for there not to be a national orchestra”. People must appreciate“what it’s there for, what it can deliver”.