Oliver O'Brien, who died on September 16th, aged 79, was an important activist in the field of choral and sacred music in Ireland for over three decades. He had long associations with the Palestrina Choir of the Pro-Cathedral in Dublin, Our Lady's Choral Society, and Carysfort College in Blackrock.
He was born into a musical Dublin family on March 28th 1922. His father, Vincent, famous for having nurtured the talent of the great tenor, John McCormack, was the long-time director of the Palestrina Choir and was involved in the founding of Our Lady's Choral Society; his grandfather and two of his uncles were also professional musicians associated with prominent Catholic churches in Dublin.
He was educated at Belvedere College, and studied at the Royal Irish Academy of Music and University College Dublin. And in a remarkable achievement, after his father's death in 1948, he continued the family tradition in the major institutions his father had worked for. He became director of the Palestrina Choir, chorus master of Our Lady's Choral Society, and taught music at Carysfort College.
He was, by nature, a conservative man, more interested in perpetuating the values he inherited than in striking off in new or unexpected directions. Yet, under his guidance, Our Lady's Choral Society made an impression on the musical world that was not confined to Ireland. The choir travelled to Rome in 1950 for a performance of Handel's Messiah, and sang in Verdi's Requiem in Paris on the way back. Elgar's Dream of Gerontius entered their repertoire for the first time in 1952, given as part of the Cardinal Newman Centenary Celebrations with Kathleen Ferrier (then terminally ill) and the HallΘ Orchestra under Sir John Barbirolli.
The association with both Elgar and Barbirolli was to prove long and fruitful. The choir performed the Elgar with the Berlin Philharmonic in Germany in 1956, and it featured in Italy again two years later. Barbirolli's biographer, Charles Reid, records a Messiah in Perugia as "his best to date" in the conductor's own view. Barbirolli also conducted the first part of Gerontius for Pope Pius XII at Castelgandolfo in 1958, with piano accompaniment by Oliver O'Brien. The Irish voices, joined in the admonition "Go forth upon thy journey, Christian soul", were, Barbirolli liked to surmise, the last live music the Pope heard. Pope Pius XII died the following week.
Barbirolli's estimation of Oliver O'Brien and his choir - which had begun life in 1945 as the 360-strong Amalgamated Catholic Choirs of the Diocese of Dublin - brought collaborations in Manchester in 1958 and the Royal Albert Hall in London in 1961. The choir also visited Monaco (performing in Beethoven's Choral Symphony at the invitation of Princess Grace) and performed the Berlioz Requiem (at Croke Park) and the premiΦre of Brian Boydell's A Terrible Beauty is Born, a cantata commissioned to mark the 50th anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising. The association with Barbirolli continued right up to the end of the conductor's life - they performed the Verdi Requiem and Gerontius at the National Stadium just weeks before his death in 1970.
Oliver O'Brien's work with the Palestrina Choir was rather less in the public eye, the tradition of 16th-century polyphony within the Catholic liturgy being maintained in spite of the emerging popular challenge of contemporary music in the form of folk masses. He was made a Papal Knight of St Gregory in 1976. He retired from the Palestrina Choir in 1978 and from Our Lady's Choral Society in 1979, just missing the opportunity of being directly involved in the Mass in the Phoenix Park during the visit of Pope John Paul II. Like his father, he married late, and met his wife, Elizabeth, who survives him, when she was one of his pupils. He was a quiet, unassuming, gentlemanly presence, whose absorption with music appeared to be complete.
Oliver O'Brien: born 1922; died, September 2001