The National Concert Hall has outgrown its Earlsfort Terrace premises - and with its neighbours, UCD, planning to move on next year, there will be scope to create an ultra-modern, multi-purpose music performance complex for Dublin, writes Arminta Wallace
The National Concert Hall will be 25 years old next year. Cause for celebration? Undoubtedly. But also, perhaps, a time for re- evaluation. By the end of 2006, those departments of University College, Dublin, which currently share the Earlsfort Terrace premises with the NCH should have moved to the university's Belfield campus - leaving behind a parcel of land and buildings which, stretching from Hatch Street on one side to the Department of Foreign Affairs on the other, with the green belt formed by the Iveagh Gardens to the rear, adds up to some seven acres of highly desirable real-estate. This in turn, offers the tantalising prospect of an ultra-modern, multi-purpose music performance complex for Dublin, along the lines of those which have opened recently in Cardiff, Gateshead and Amsterdam.
But what kind of concert hall does Dublin really need? And what sort of music should be performed there? Should it be "NCH squared" - or does a 21st-century performance space demand a radical rethinking of the performance aesthetic? "We would like to develop an iconic building for performance, and for the benefit of the whole of the musical community," says the NCH's artistic director, Judith Woodworth. At the moment, she says, the NCH is paying the price of its own success. "Last year we were open for events 361 days of the year; we have 80 per cent average capacity for all our concerts in the main auditorium; and something upwards of 300,000 people come through the door every year. Now that's terrific - but what is frustrating for us is that we are constantly turning away opportunities on all sorts of different levels, whether it's an international ensemble, or artists for whom we don't have availability, or events for which we're not the right size."
The NCH Celebrity Concert Series is a case in point - the 1,200-seat hall, she says, is almost always sold out for the visits of such international superstars as Alfred Brendel, Maxim Vengerov and Cecilia Bartoli. Space limitations also place severe restrictions on education and outreach work, much of which has to be done off-site. Backstage facilities and wheelchair access are poor, and the lack of a second dedicated recital space - the John Field Room is effectively silenced when the main auditorium is in action - is "a huge drawback".
To top it all, the main auditorium itself is in need of a fairly major overhaul. Such a refurbishment would, says Woodworth, cost in the region of €20 million; and would involve "darkening" the hall while the work was carried out. "We have worked very hard with the Office of Public Works to keep our public areas up to scratch, but they are simply not acceptable by international standards - and certainly not for a hall that claims to be producing the best of musical activity into the 21st century. We're concerned that we're going to find it harder and harder to hold our hand up and say that we are a hall worthy of representing, not simply Dublin as a capital city, but Ireland as a vibrant musical and cultural nation," she says.
Which sounds terrific - in theory. In practice there are one or two details to be ironed out. A UCD spokesperson points out that although the college is keen to move all its activities to Belfield, as scheduled, by the end of 2006, there has "as yet been no decision in terms of how this transfer might be funded". The departments at Earlsfort Terrace are varied, ranging from post-graduate nursing to engineering through medicine and folklore, and include expensive equipment and laboratories. A spokesman for the Department of Arts, Sports and Tourism, meanwhile, says "there is a recognition that the National Concert Hall facilities and resources need to be enhanced and updated". Discussions between the various interested parties are believed to be at a preliminary stage - but are likely to be complicated by the building's listed status, which is bound to cause conflicting assessments of its market value.
A feasibility study has, however, given the project a provisional thumbs-up - which, at least, marks an improvement on previous plans for the NCH. Last year, the idea of a move to Grand Canal Basin was rejected by the Minister for Arts, John O'Donoghue, on the grounds that the proposed site "would not offer any significant improvement over the present location given the expenditure that would be involved"; five years ago, suggestions that the NCH should move to the Phoenix Park, or perhaps to Collins Barracks, never - happily - got off the ground.
ACCORDING TO THE assistant principal architect at the Office of Public Works, Klaus Unger, a recent OPW survey examined the Earlsfort Terrace site with a view to what would work in the available space and which buildings might be retained and adapted. "The main building, which dates from 1908, is a very well-made structure and would lend itself perfectly for re-use," he says. As for the site as a whole, "the main features of a new concert hall complex could be slotted in very comfortably".
One of the biggest advantages of the present site is the presence of the leafy Iveagh Gardens, often referred to as "Dublin's best-kept secret" and accessed at present through a somewhat rickety gate at the back of a car-park. Without encroaching on this increasingly precious green space, a new building could successfully incorporate it into its design, says Unger. He points out that the three concert halls which are considered to be, acoustically, the greatest in the world - the Musikverein in Vienna, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam and Boston's Symphony Hall - are all 19th-century buildings which, like the NCH, originally boasted spacious gardens alongside. "The other halls have all lost that amenity as the cities have developed," he says. "They'd give their eye teeth for what we have here."
Restaurants overlooking the gardens and summer-evening strolls in the park would, as Judith Woodworth points out, be an exciting prospect for concert-goers - as would the provision of a not-so-leafy underground car park. Ideally, she says, a development plan would include a totally new 2,000-seater hall in addition to the upgrading and modernisation of the present hall, resulting in a second space of approximately 900 seats; further down the line, there would be a third performance space of 300-400 seats.
"We could have an even wider and more varied offering of international artists coming to the hall," she says. "We could have residencies with other ensembles in addition to our core residency of the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra; and we'd like to provide rehearsal space for musical groups which work in Dublin."
She talks about greater accessibility, a wider range of ticket prices, cultural tourism. Without specific plans in place it's not easy to put a price tag on this kind of project; but Woodworth mentions a figure of "something around €120 to €130 million in total". Which, when you get right down to it, is probably a snip. The Wales Millennium Centre (WMC) in Cardiff, with its dramatic copper roof adorned with the words "In these stones horizons sing", cost £106 million.
But the WMC was designed primarily as an opera house. Could Dublin afford to spend a huge sum on a new space for symphonic music, without somehow putting opera into the performance pot? The artistic director of Opera Theatre Company, Andrew McLellan, points out that Dublin has no performance space suitable for the kind of dramatically intimate shows his touring company stages - but admits to a certain cynicism on the subject of new buildings.
"Buildings are way down the agenda as far as we're concerned," he says. "We need to look at the way the buildings we have are used at the moment, and at what is on in them. My fear is that any new building would becomea conference centre in six months. The WMC is the home of Welsh National Opera, and that's fine. But there's a group called Music Theatre Wales, which I suppose would be the Welsh equivalent of us - and they can't perform there, because there's a huge space and a tiny space and nothing in between."
Fergus Sheil, formerly of the contemporary music performance group Crash Ensemble, and now music specialist consultant to the Arts Council, also expresses concern about devoting resources to building a large venue. "I would suggest that there is a more urgent need in Dublin for a medium-sized performance space, which could be properly lit and amplified if necessary, and used for a variety of different musics such as jazz, contemporary music and others."
THIS POINT ABOUT DIVERSITY is an interesting one. "A national cultural institution should be challenging," says Judith Woodworth. "It should be innovative; it should be taking risks; it should be able to reflect the changes in musical taste; and it should be feeding those changes." At present, the National Concert Hall's programming is built around the twin pillars of the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra's residency and the NCH-promoted Celebrity Concert Series, with independent promoters filling in the gaps with events which can encompass anything from - leafing through the schedule for the coming months - popular opera through amateur dramatics to Pam Ayres. But it is, and is likely to remain, primarily a symphonic venue; which begs the question of whether, in the 21st century, a national musical performance space should be firstly - or even mostly - a space designed for "classical" music.
"A national concert hall," says the artistic director of the independent Improvised Music Company, Gerry Godley, "should be exactly that: a concert hall for all of the people of the nation, and all of the different musics of the nation. The wonderful new buildings that are going up around Europe - the Bimhuis in Amsterdam or The Sage in Gateshead - are very strong architectural statements which, in themselves, make a statement about the value of music in society; but they are also a structural expression of an engagement with a new musical paradigm based on parity and partnership."
There's more to The Sage, he insists, than just a beautiful building. "Everything that the building articulates in its revolutionary design is repeated in its revolutionary approach to music. The rationale which informs The Sage is devastatingly simple. It makes no distinction between genres of music - contemporary or vernacular, art music or folk music - because increasingly, I think, audiences don't make those distinctions."
As an independent promoter of jazz and world music concerts, Improvised Music Company has, says Godley, spent 10 years making the case for investment in performance resources for those musics which fall between symphonic music, on the one hand, and commercially viable rock and pop on the other. Between those two polarities lies a huge - and growing - chunk of the musical DNA of the country.
"If the State is going to make the kind of level of investment being talked about at Earlsfort Terrace, it really needs to think about what the musical landscape of the city will be in 10, 20 . . . 40 years from now. The historical view has been that symphonic music is at the apex of the evolutionary system - but that in itself is changing. The National Concert Hall is the flagship institution for the promotion of music in the State, and it has to be in the vanguard of articulating the power and strength of music in all its diversity. This debate is about music, with a capital M."