Stand up and face the music

Ulster Orchestra's new chief executive, David Byers, is optimistic about the orchestral future, he tells Michael Dervan.

It's been a feature of the musical world for quite a while now that the news about orchestral life is often bad. Orchestras, it seems, especially in the US, lurch from crisis to crisis, losing audiences, money, and closing down at an unprecedented rate.

But, hey, what's this the American Symphony Orchestra League was reporting on the 2000-2001 season? Record attendances at 32 million, up 16 per cent in 10 years, and record income levels, too. Doubtless the picture has changed since then, as arts organisations have suffered more than most in the new world order post-September 11th.

Crisis-ridden orchestras can, however, prove remarkably resilient. Of the eight US orchestras that were technically bankrupt at the beginning of the 1990s, all but one survived. And if you think the problems are only experienced at the lower end of the scale, think again. Simon Rattle delayed signing his contract with the Berlin Philharmonic until the players were awarded a pay increase. Incredible as it may seem, musicians in this world-leading orchestra were less well paid than their colleagues elsewhere in Germany. And Rattle also held out for new legislation to guarantee the orchestra a greater level of independence.

The Ulster Orchestra is an institution that's been through the wars in terms of survival. With 63 players and a management team of 18, it's the largest client of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, an expensive and vulnerable cultural figurehead in a riven community. Serious mutterings have been heard at various times about the future viability of the orchestra, and things became serious enough for a pay freeze to be required in order to preclude the even less palatable road of job losses.

That pay freeze was lifted in July - the orchestra received an uplift of 26 per cent to bring its ACNI support to £1.69 million - but when I asked chief executive David Byers about the challenges of managing an orchestra in the 21st century, he says, "above all, it always comes down to funding. The security of that funding to build for the future, to enable you to take risks, to buy in the soloists and conductors that you want, to buy in the extras and the deputies" - the orchestra's size means that many key works of the symphonic repertoire require the hiring of extra players. And then there's the cost of marketing, "because in terms of the Ulster Orchestra, we survive or fall on our box office. If we don't have the audience, we're gone."

Byers has been associated with the orchestra for a long time. He's been a member of its board, and he's been one of its de facto programmers, mapping out as a BBC producer the work that would be selected for broadcast, some of it from the orchestra's own programmes, some of it created through BBC studio recordings and concerts.

The orchestra faced a succession crisis when, after the resignation of chief executive David Fisk in 2001, the recruitment process drew a blank.

Byers, who had taken early retirement from the BBC, was asked to become acting chief executive for a year. He accepted the challenge, and when the post was finally re-advertised, he applied and got the job.

The relationship between the orchestra and the BBC is an unusual one. The Ulster Orchestra as we know it today actually grew out of the notorious BBC musicians' strike of 1980, after which the BBC - successfully prevented from getting rid of some of its higher profile orchestras - went ahead and disbanded its own small orchestra in Belfast. Some of the former BBC players were merged into an expanded Ulster Orchestra, which was then established for the first time as an independent entity - before that it had been managed directly by ACNI.

The BBC's hefty support of the orchestra is justified by the amount of Ulster Orchestra work it has access to. It lays out £660,000 and, in return, has the use of the orchestra for 30 programmes for Radio 3, whether these are relays of the orchestra's own subscription concerts or programmes over which the BBC takes full artistic control. BBC Radio Ulster is allowed a further five programmes, plus live broadcast rights on 10 of the orchestra's subscription concerts.

On top of all of that, the BBC has rights to three televised hours of the orchestra's work. The BBC's involvement guarantees valuable radio and television exposure and appearances at the Proms, the latter a challenge not yet cracked by the RTÉ NSO. The output the BBC itself originates ranges from the byways of the orchestral repertoire (in free invitation concerts) to populist extravaganzas like last Saturday's Proms in the Park in front of City Hall, Belfast, part of which featured as an insert into the TV broadcast of the Last Night of the Proms.

"It's a good deal for the BBC," says Byers with quiet understatement.

"It's also a good deal for the orchestra in terms of exposure, and in terms of the variety of repertoire which it enables us to do - and in terms of our outreach in Belfast, access and everything else, to have 12 invitation concerts each season which are totally free, and repertoire which quite often we would not be able to programme, because it may be too adventurous, too unknown in terms of guaranteeing a box office income."

The opening of the Waterfront Hall, says Byers, as well as the availability of special funds around the time of the Millennium, and "advancement funding" from ACNI, enabled the orchestra for a period to explore larger repertoire - for instance, symphonies by Mahler and Bruckner that were new to the orchestra. But what he calls "that South Sea bubble" has burst, and the orchestra's annual revenue, which peaked at £3.4 million, is now a more modest £3 million.

In its first year with current principal conductor and artistic adviser Thierry Fischer, the orchestra programmed what was probably its most adventurous season. It was a risk which proved costly, and Byers acknowledges that programming decisions since then have been more cautious. Fischer conducted a Schubert symphony cycle last season, and this year is offering all the Beethoven symphonies.

But his approach to the classical repertoire is fresh. In his days as a professional flautist, he played under Nikolaus Harnoncourt, and he's been much influenced by period instrument practices in his handling of the Viennese classics. His forthcoming Beethoven cycle has caught the fancy of Radio 3 and, strange as it may seem, an entire Beethoven cycle by an Irish orchestra will feature on Radio 3 in the coming months.

Byers gets fired up when he talks about the challenge of renewing the orchestra's audience. There have been two major surveys on the orchestra and its activities. The first, funded by ACNI, is on the social and economic benefits of the orchestra; the other, commissioned by the orchestra from Price Waterhouse Coopers, examines the audience, its habits and needs, and its responses to what the orchestra does, from preferences of venue, to assessments of pre-concert talks, and also, of course, including the all-important issue of musical preferences.

"It's scary and reassuring," he says, "The one thing that comes out is that the loyalty of that audience to the Ulster Orchestra is phenomenal. Having got that core, we've got to keep them on board, and then develop along with the new people who are coming in." They have to be careful, he says, "not to assume that everyone's heard a Beethoven symphony".

The sort of balancing act that's involved when the orchestra needs to fill the 2,000 plus seats at the Waterfront Hall is well illustrated by the season's opening concert on Friday. Nikolai Demidenko plays Beethoven's Emperor Concerto, and that warhorse is coupled with Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony. But the first work of the evening is a new piece, intriguingly titled And Pigs Might Fly by Belfast composer Brian Irvine, a man who straddles a range of musical worlds - he won BBC Jazz Award last July.

Education iscrucial to the process of audience development, says Byers, as well as important in identifying the orchestra as a body that reaches out to all corners of the community. "This year coming, we've put together a very exciting project called Gulliver. We're going to spend two and a half months in four parts of Belfast, North, South, East and West, with four schools in each area, two Catholic, two Protestant, and we'll be working in areas of social disadvantage. Each of the four groups will be reacting to one of the sections of Gulliver's Travels, and as well as the musicians, we'll be sending in a storyteller, a composer and a visual artist, all working under an overall animateur." At the moment, says Byers, he's in optimistic mood about the orchestra.

He's clearly fired up by the Gulliver project and the success of Fischer as principal conductor - and on top of that, "box office is up, subscriptions are up, and I've only had one complaint that the programme for next season is too popular".

The Ulster Orchestra opens its season with Brian Irvine, Beethoven and Tchaikovsky under Thierry Fischer at the Waterfront Hall on Friday. The same programme (with Mozart's Don Giovanni Overture replacing the Brian Irvine work) can be heard a day earlier at the Millennium Forum in Derry.