The appointment of Niall Doyle as the new Director of Music at RTE is an adventurous one. The station's music department is effectively the largest arts organisation on this island, both in terms of its budget (which exceeds £5 million) and in the number of people it employs (over 130 musicians alone). Organisations as large as the Wexford Festival and Opera Ireland are heavily dependent on the goodwill of RTE, as are a host of smaller undertakings, from choral concerts to musicals, to chamber music events, where dependence is only revealed by the note that RTE musicians appear "by kind permission of the RTE Authority".
It has been a long time since RTE last brought in an outsider at the highest level of music management. It has been widely felt outside of RTE that a fresh perspective has been sorely needed within a management structure where many of the key positions have been filled by internal re-juggling rather than the process of open, competitive recruitment.
Doyle arrives in his post with impressive developmental work at the Music Network behind him. Under his guidance that body has expanded to become the busiest concert organiser in the land - the Network's annual throughput of concerts has actually overtaken RTE's. And the tenfold increase in staffing levels and nearly six-fold increase in annual budget are fully indicative of the vision he brought to an organisation that seemed to have reached a plateau on his appointment there in 1992.
He comes to RTE at an interesting time. The station's finances are less than healthy, yet aspects of musical culture at the station have been developing in positive ways. The RTE Vanbrugh String Quartet, along with Francis Humphrys, have been at the heart of developing an international chamber music festival in West Cork. The RTE Philharmonic Choir is back in safe hands, and developing well under Mark Duley.
Alexander Anissimov, who takes over as principal conductor of the NSO next season, looks like the man most likely to turn the artistic fortunes of the orchestra around. Quite apart from the quality of his concerts, he has been showing the sort of nurturing presence - sitting in the audience at other men's concerts, for instance - that hasn't been felt strongly from a principal conductor since the days of Bryden Thomson.
???E has operated in recent years? Will he have to live with the absurd prioritising of recordings over concerts that has been allowed to develop? And will the unappetising cast of seasons as a whole as well as individual programmes be allowed to persist? It's one thing having all the ingredients; it's another having the skill to make truly mouth-watering use of them. Compared with similar orchestras abroad, the NSO's educational, community and national touring activities are very limited indeed. The level of attention to the major music of our time is negligible, and the failure to nurture a picture of the repertoire of Irish music - both by living composers as well as the long-dead - is a scandal. The RTE Concert Orchestra continues to find itself betwixt and between in matters of repertoire, and it is still without a suitable home to work in. At the same time, the NSO's home is under threat from the plans of the National Concert Hall and of John O'Conor's proposed Irish Academy For The Performing Arts. The raison d'etre of the NCH - to provide a suitable home for what was then the RTESO, and give it the benefit of rehearsing and performing in the one venue - has long been forgotten by the powers-that-be in Earlsfort Terrace.
