Rich year for music, poor show on opera

Flashback 2004/Opera and classical: The past 12 months were good for music, with many and varied productions, but opera remains neglected, writes Michael Dervan.

This year has been in many respects a heartening one for music. The RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, in Dublin, and the Ulster Orchestra, in Belfast, are in safe hands as regards principal conductors and programmers.

The RTÉ Concert Orchestra continues the challenge of breaking new ground and consolidating its image as an orchestra to reckon with in serious repertoire under its principal conductor, Laurent Wagner.

The Irish Chamber Orchestra, unexpectedly and rather late in the day, shifted its Killaloe Music Festival into the heart of Limerick city under a new name, Shannon International Music Festival, and the transition to St Mary's Cathedral paid off handsomely in terms of new audiences and brought some qualified improvements in terms of acoustics, too.

And the National Chamber Choir has sustained the rethink of its programming and the high performing standards that have become its hallmark under its dynamic artistic director, Celso Antunes.

The most recent golden age of the RTÉ NSO was back in the mid-1980s, when the late Bryden Thomson was principal conductor. One of Thomson's achievements was the celebration of core values through the thematic programming of core repertoire. It's an obvious enough approach but also one that needs careful handling. An orchestra that fails in core repertoire runs the risk of alienating rather than rewarding its public. This is exactly what happened to the NSO a number of years ago, in an ill-advised Beethoven series under Alexander Anissimov.

Beethoven has been on the agenda again, with Thierry Fischer taking a deft and spirited period-instruments approach with the Ulster Orchestra and Gerhard Markson adopting a weightier, more old-fashioned but still highly energised approach with the NSO. Markson's Beethoven performances of 2004 are only a foretaste of what's to come. Next May, at the end of the season, he'll undertake all nine symphonies in just five days. Live concerts still offer a richness of experience that CDs simply cannot match, in spite of the wealth of artificial detailing that can be contrived through clever recording techniques. The concentrated concert-hall exposure of a Beethoven cycle over five days is just the sort of thing to help redraw perspectives for anyone who cares to open themselves to the full experience.

West Cork Chamber Music Festival's enterprising Francis Humphrys offered just such a potential experience with an Easter cycle of the Beethoven piano sonatas, shared between Philippe Cassard, Joanna MacGregor and Hugh Tinney, in which each performed in each of the six concerts. Sadly, the event was not a success. Only Tinney managed to give the impression of meeting the music on its own terms. And the negative impact of MacGregor's playing could be assessed by the large number of empty seats for her performance of the Diabelli variations at the festival itself.

In spite of the success of the ICO's relocated festival, the orchestra's playing in Limerick was surprisingly varied in standard. The current artistic director, Nicholas McGegan, who ends his three-year term next summer, hasn't managed to keep the same consistent rein on technical delivery as his predecessor, Fionnuala Hunt, although, on the peak of his form, his musical achievements have been rewarding across a broader range of repertoire than Hunt ever managed. The ICO performances that stand out most clearly, however, are those of Vivaldi under Nigel Kennedy, who in November seemed able to galvanise the players to levels of achievement that other conductors and directors hardly dream of.

The NSO is currently engaged on an extended and imaginative retrospective of Stravinsky. It's part of that return to core values in a season where solidity of programming has been paramount. At the same time, however, the exclusion of serious consideration of work by living composers from those core values raises cause for concern. The music department at RTÉ faces very serious problems in the area of new music: it simply doesn't seem to have the internal knowledge or expertise to address the issue adequately or with persuasive passion.

The RTÉ Living Music Festival, programmed by outsiders, has been a welcome addition to the nation's musical life. But, without adequate representation of the best of new music in the subscription concerts (and I'm not talking about Irish composers, whose cause RTÉ does support), even a consistently successful Living Music Festival will come to be yet another ghetto. The problem is essentially one of understanding the relationships between existing and potential listeners and knowing how to devise concerts with the greatest potential reach. It's not rocket science, but it is a highly specialised task. In spite of Laurent Wagner's significant performing successes, the programming for the RTÉCO leaves great room for improvement, as does the branding of it. And the NSO's address to core values has been targeted primarily at the core audience - and, in terms of box office, sometimes not even at that. The upturn in RTÉ's music output is manifest, but there's a long road still to travel.

Before saying a word about opera, the woeful state of its funding needs to be pointed out. Ireland may be a high- income-generating country, but signs of the wealth that so many commentators believe in are not much in evidence in the arts, and certainly not in opera.

Wales, which has little of the recent prosperity of the Republic, has just opened a landmark €113 million opera house, Wales Millennium Centre. Denmark's richest man, Maersk McKinney Møller, has just donated a €336 million opera house, in Copenhagen, to the country, population 5.4 million. The Danes' annual public subsidy of their Royal Theatre (opera, ballet, drama) now amounts to €67.3 million, and a further €13.5 million has been allocated for 2005-8 for the new house. Finnish National Opera Company, which covers opera and ballet for a nation of 5.2 million, is supported by the state and the cities around Helsinki to the tune of €44.7 million.

The Arts Council has an opera budget, covering Opera Ireland, Wexford Festival Opera and Opera Theatre Company, of €2.5 million. The Arts Council of Northern Ireland, having axed Opera Northern Ireland in favour of a new all-Ireland opera company in 1998, then changed tack; it has been importing productions from Welsh National Opera and will from next year continue the process with Leeds-based Opera North. Its total opera spend, including Belfast, the summer season at Castleward, the associated fringe festival and visits by Opera Theatre Company, is £598,000 (€864,000).

In a way, one probably shouldn't complain at the Arts Council of Northern Ireland's approach. Some of the Welsh productions have been of the highest standard, and in terms of musical and theatrical preparation there has been nothing else on this island to match the best of what Welsh National Opera has presented in Belfast.

This year the company put the Irish opera public particularly in its debt for bringing over its Patrice Caurier and Moshe Leiser production of Gluck's Iphigénie En Tauride, revived by Jean-Michel Criqui, with Ann Murray showing the mesmerising range of her dramatic gifts in the title role.

Opera Theatre Company has a new artistic director, Annilese Miskimmon, who showed her flair as a director in the European première of Vera Of Las Vegas, by the US composer Daron Hagen.

In artistic terms Opera Ireland has been its own inscrutable self, with standards fluctuating wildly between and within productions. I was delighted to see Gluck's Orfeo reappearing in the repertoire of the winter season, and it was good to see the company showing faith in an Irish production team (David Bolger and Monica Frawley). I didn't get to the production, which meant the highlight of the Opera Ireland year for me was Jiri Nekvasil's understated spring production of Janácek's Jenufa, conducted by Laurent Wagner, with Franzita Whelan a resilient presence in the title role.

With the departure of Luigi Ferrari as artistic director, Wexford Festival Opera is at a fascinating crossroads. A new artistic director, David Agler, is in place, and the early indications are that he's going to do things very differently from Ferrari. The festival has a major rebuild of its theatre in the offing - and is looking for major state funding for it. Wexford has also been all too blatantly ignoring Irish talent for years. It's only reasonable to expect the changes to seep in here too.

This year's achievements in the Theatre Royal, sadly, did not really see Ferrari exiting on a high. Whatever the turnout in Wexford, the smart money is still on the RTÉ NSO not returning as the festival's regular orchestra.

Take five . . .

. . . highlights

1 Defiant bluntness was the order of the day in Never . . . Never . . . Never, Stephen Gardner's orchestral interpretation of an imaginary Francis Bacon portrait of Ian Paisley. Gerhard Markson and the RTÉ NSO took the challenge head-on in February; the orchestra hit a fresh, stylish peak in October in a Dvorák programme under Libor Pesek.

2 The highlight of the RTÉ Living Music Festival in February was Ensemble Intercontemporain's performance of Pierre Boulez's shimmering Sur Incises, for the unique combination of three harps, three pianos and three percussion - an intellectually stimulating sensual delight.

3 The Sonic Arts Research Centre in Belfast opened its doors officially in April. Its performing space, with loudspeakers everywhere, makes it a unique resource for composers, researchers and others to use to explore sonic developments.

4 Dorothy Cross's production for Opera Theatre Company of Pergolesi's Stabat Mater, at the Slate Quarry Grotto on Valentia Island, was strangely transfixing, an event whose atmosphere was even added to by persistent drizzle.

5 Heinrich Biber's Mystery sonatas, uniquely coloured by their unusual scordatura of the violin, are a string landmark. Maya Homburger's performance at East Cork Early Music Festival commun- icated seven of them with impressive sureness of finger and spirit.