Small town, big noise

The development of musical life, and cultural life in general, in Norway has been strongly driven by government policy. In music alone, the infrastructure of 340 schools of music is entirely a post-war development. When you see what this policy has brought to a country which, like Ireland, has a low population (4.2 million) and similar problems of wide-flung communities, the calls on the Arts Council - most recently heard at its consultative session on music in the next Arts Plan - to clarify its policy, create new partnerships and develop coherent policies at national level, seem all the more urgent.

Stavanger, with a population of 100,000, is located on the south-west coast, a gruelling eight-hour drive from Oslo in summer when the weather is good (in winter the journey takes considerably longer). It's in fjord country, within reach of one of Norway's major tourist attractions, the Pulpit Rock, a 25-metre square platform, attached like a pulpit at the top of a 2,000-foot high sheer cliff and commanding unique views along the Lysefjord.

The city is best known these days as Norway's oil capital (the executives fly rather than drive), but of late its international reputation has begun to travel in partnership with music. The Stavanger Symphony Orchestra is just about to join the international traffic which, over the next six months, will bring to these shores orchestras from Copenhagen, London, San Francisco, St Petersburg, Oslo, Sofia, and Stuttgart. When you add Stavanger to that list, it really does stand out.

It's not a large place. With a population of around 100,000, it's significantly smaller than Cork, or around the size of British towns like Solihull or Slough that no-one expects to support symphonic music. And yet the SSO has been to the Edinburgh and Schleswig-Holstein festivals, has specialised in period performance style on modern instruments under Frans Bruggen, and is engaged in recording projects with the highly-regarded Swedish label, BIS. How did it all happen? Managing director Anna-Marie Antonius explains that the orchestra came into being in 1938, with just 18 musicians. A gradual expansion took place over the years and in 1964 reached the point where the name was changed to the Stavanger Symphony Orchestra.

"In those years the government had a plan for building up the orchestras in Norway, of giving more money, improving the finances from year to year of the four symphony orchestras we have here." Those four are in the cities of Oslo and Bergen (both now with more players than the NSO's 88), Trondheim and Stavanger (both around the size of the old RTESO). In 1987 the SSO had 60 players, 11 of them part-time. Now it has 71, and just three of them are part-timers.

But growth in numbers - and the expanding repertoire which that opened up - was only one strand of development. The orchestra also found itself able to hire better conductors. The key year in this respect, says Antonius, was 1990. "That was the year when they worked several times with Frans Bruggen. It was obvious that Bruggen and the orchestra enjoyed working together and that he saw a particular potential here. But he's at the forefront of the historical way of playing and that means he's very expensive."

Fortunately, it was around this time that Norway's state oil company, Statoil, came on board as sponsor. "Statoil made it possible to engage Frans Bruggen. That was extremely important. Working with him lifted the orchestra. They improved a lot, and the world got to know about their special partnership. When talking to soloists and conductors and recruiting new musicians, the name of Frans Bruggen was very important. It became easier to get better quality on all these fronts."

Philippe Herreweghe, Bruno Weil and Roy Goodman are among the other period performance style conductors the orchestra has targeted. And, for the last eight years, Bruggen oversees his specialised area of repertoire, Alexander Dmitriev, who has a special interest in Russian repertoire and French impressionism, has been the principal conductor. Crucial to the orchestra's development was the opening of Stavanger's concert hall in 1982. It's a converted building, a squat dome that used to be an exhibition centre, now cocooning a 1,000-seater auditorium between necessarily limited foyer space and backstage facilities. Anna-Marie Antonius, whose job carries responsibility for the hall as well as the orchestra, recounts the SSO's experience of venues as a recurring cycle of metamorphosis.

Solutions that are welcome when new reveal intractable problems over time. The orchestra played in the theatre and then in a hotel function room before the concert hall was opened. The hallwas soon found to have acoustic problems, which have only partly been remedied by electronic assistance. The audience has benefited more than the players, who still experience difficulties from the acoustic limitations. Since Antonius's appointment last year the campaign for a new venue has begun and has already made headway in having the need for the new development accepted by the local politicians.

The existing hall is located in the Bjergsted park, not far from "Old Stavanger", with its historic concentration of 173, closely-built, small wooden houses. Bjergsted houses the local music school (3,000 students in 1997), the music conservatory (168 students and its own recital hall). And in a converted, waterside canning plant nearby organisations representing local musical interests (festivals, the Rogaland County music council, bands, and so on) all have their offices.

The sense of civic pride engendered by such practical and dynamic resourcing of music extends to other art forms, too. I wasn't long in Stavanger before I was taken to the newly re-housed Rogaland Art Museum - where the major presence is the work of Lars Hertervig (1830-1902) some of whose romantic landscapes have a surreal, Max Ernstian feel - and the Rogaland Theatre, with a permanent company of 25 actors and three performing spaces. During my daytime visits there were children and young people everywhere - with school tours of the art exhibitions, and children darting through doors in costume in the theatre. The orchestra, too, conforms to the national policy of reaching out to new audiences and young people. Many of the Thursday night subscription concerts are repeated on Fridays, with heavily reduced ticket prices for the young, and the music introduced by one of the players from the stage. Fully 30 per cent of orchestral attendances in 1997 were by young people or students. A project involving local schools has seen young people tutored in writing for small ensembles over a period of a year in preparation for composing a three-minute piece for performance by the full orchestra. A scheme operates for Nordic composers under the age of 35 to compete for the opportunity of working with and having their music performed by the SSO. Twenty-seven performances of contemporary pieces were given in 1997, five of them Norwegian.

The orchestra's recordings for BIS are of Norwegian music, three volumes so far of Harald Saeverud, and a new project under way to revive the music of Geirr Tveitt, some of whose Folksong Arrangements will open the Irish concerts. On top of all this, the SSO runs and promotes its own chamber music series, featuring players from the orchestra.

The orchestra's financial situation - not untypically for cultural institutions in Norway - is one that many an arts organisation in Ireland would envy, with over 85 per cent of the £4.2 million budget coming out of the public purse. The government provides 70 per cent of the public subsidy, the city 20 per cent, and the county 10 per cent. This particular arrangement was set up by the government in recent years, when it decided to take over responsibility for funding the orchestras from the NRK, the national broadcasting service. The SSO's concerts are available free of charge to NRK, and most of them are broadcast, bringing in a listenership of 300,000.

But the SSO is not thinking of resting on its laurels. "Unfortunately," says Antonius, "we can't say today that today the government has a plan for expanding the orchestra. But we have a plan for it. Our plan is to have 90 players in five years' time." The search for a new conductor to succeed Dmitriev is being carried out with urgency, and Statoil has recently signed a new, three-year contract, guaranteeing foreign appearances tied in with the company's developing markets. "We are young and very dynamic, a youthful orchestra with high aspirations and high ambitions, not only to improve and get better artistically. But, like Statoil, the orchestra wants to go out in the world. We want not only to do a good job in our home town, our home district, and in Norway, but also in other countries, where you get measured in different ways. Everybody has to stretch."

The Stavanger Symphony Orchestra plays in Tveitt, Sibelius (the Violin Concerto with Henning Kraggerud as soloist), and Dvorak under Vassily Sinaisky in Galway on Monday and Limerick on Tuesday. At the National Concert Hall on Wednesday, the soloist in Dvorak's Cello Concerto is Truls Mork.