For a brief period during the late 1940s and through the 1950s, lovers of classical music in Dublin enjoyed a venue that is today almost forgotten, the Phoenix Hall. For those who attended concerts there, the name has assumed an almost magical aura. It was a simple, austere place where the quality of music making was superb.
In 1947, Radio Éireann decided to split its orchestra into two separate orchestras, the symphony and the light. At the beginning of the following year, the radio station opened the Phoenix Hall in Dame Court, between Exchequer Street and Dame Street in Dublin city centre. As Richard Pine recalls in his recently published book, Music and Broadcasting in Ireland, the hall had previously been used by the Irish Hospital Sweepstakes organisation.
The Phoenix Hall was a radio studio with room for an audience, rather than a concert hall as such. It replaced the Round Room of the Mansion House, and the Capitol Theatre in O'Connell Street, where public concerts had been held previously, while Michael Bowles was Radio Éireann's first director of music; he also conducted the radio orchestra.
This new hall was decidedly spartan and as a now retired RTÉ conductor, Eimear Ó Broin, recalls, the acoustics were a little dry and some more reverberation would have been welcome. But the hall had room for 400 hard wooden seats and one of the advantages of concerts there was that the audience was seated close to the orchestra, in a very intimate music-making atmosphere. A series of guest and principal conductors appeared regularly in the Phoenix Hall, including Jean Martinon from France, Milan Horvat, who was Croatian, and Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt, from Germany. Great Irish artists, such as the pianist Charles Lynch, also performed there.
Eimear Ó Broin recalls that usually three concerts were staged each week. On Tuesdays, the programme would include new pieces, while the Friday symphony concerts had more popular works from the classical repertoire. On Saturday nights, the Radio Éireann Light Orchestra performed.From 1952 onwards, children's concerts were staged at the Phoenix Hall, which also served as the venue for a summer school of music.
Eimear Ó Broin says that the classical programmes were surprisingly adventurous and were a good outlet for new works, some Irish, some international. He remembers a Shostakovich symphony being played not long after it had had received its first performance in the USSR.
Often, new international works were performed in the Phoenix Hall long before they were first performed in London and at one stage in the late 1950s, a delegation from the BBC arrived at Radio Éireann - then based at the top of the General Post Office in O'Connell Street - to find out just how the station was managing to broadcast such a wide classical music repertoire on such a limited budget.
In those far-off days in radio music, a time of great financial austerity, a certain creative inventiveness was in the air, recalls Eimear Ó Broin.
From an audience perspective, the Phoenix Hall had another great advantage - the concerts were free. People simply collected their tickets from Radio Éireann in advance. On the way into the concerts in the hall, groups of classical music enthusiasts would chat away about the programme they were about to hear, without any of the social one-upmanship that seems to beset so much modern concert going. Once inside the hall and seated on those hard wooden seats, the audience could enjoy the hors d'oeuvres of the orchestra tuning up.
Such was the excitement generated by those concerts that when Milan Horvat gave his final concert in Ireland, at the Phoenix Hall in the mid-1950s, the excitement rivalled and even excelled what would have been seen at a Beatles concert.
The Phoenix Hall survived as a music radio studio only for about 12 years, before being superseded by the much larger St Francis Xavier Hall in Upper Sherrard Street. For most of the 1960s, the Budapest-born conductor Tibor Paul was principal conductor of the Radio Éireann Symphony Orchestra and the radio station's director of music. The St Francis Xavier Hall was used for concerts through the 1960s, 1970s and into the 1980s; the free Friday evening classical concerts there were very popular. Another venue, the Gaiety Theatre, had begun to be used for Sunday orchestral concerts in 1953 and these continued for many years.
A couple of fruitless attempts were made to build a proper concert hall in Dublin. In 1960, work started on clearing at site at the junction of Nicholas Street and High Street, close to Christ Church Cathedral, but the project got no further. Then in 1964, the saga of the planned John F. Kennedy Memorial Hall began. This was also the first attempt at a national conference centre - which we are still awaiting, more than 40 years later.
First the was to be sited at Beggar's Bush, then in the Phoenix Park. Government dithering on the project lasted for a full decade before the plug was pulled and the government of the day finally decided to convert the Great Hall at UCD in Earlsfort Terrace into what is now the National Concert Hall.