John Kelly has taken the Irish Chamber Orchestra from an ailing organisation to a thriving, creative force in the music world, writes MichaelDervan.

It's all a bit like a rags-to-riches story. Ten years ago, when John Kelly took charge of the Irish Chamber Orchestra (ICO) it was a venerable but ailing organisation, "artistically rudderless, in spite of the occasional excellences of individual concerts", as I wrote at the time. It had but one employee, himself, and it depended on the largesse of the national broadcaster in allowing its musicians to take on extra-curricular work when the schedules of the RTÉ orchestras permitted.

Its Arts Council grant of £70,000 (€88,900) was not sufficient to support a substantial programme of activity, let alone encourage any sort of artistic risk-taking.

Today the ICO, based on the campus of the University of Limerick, has a staff of six, 19 players on contract, its own annual music festival in St Flannan's Cathedral, Killaloe, Co Clare, an active education and outreach programme, and a track record second to none in the espousal of new music by Irish composers.

In Nicholas McGegan it has a music director admired the world over for his handling of baroque music, and its principal guest director, Mariana Sirbu, is also director of Italian group I Musici, which for over half a century has been a byword for excellence in the world of chamber orchestras.

Mr Kelly came to the ICO with the advantage of a professional performing background. Of course, there are probably those in the music world who would see his particular track record less favourably.

He was a viola player, and viola players are the favourite butt of jokes in the music world, with books and websites devoted to collecting gems of the genre.

"How can you tell when a concert platform is level? The viola players drool out of both sides of their mouths." "What's the difference between the first and last desk of a viola section? Half a bar." "How can you tell when a viola-player is out of tune? The bow is moving."

Indeed, the ICO may not exactly feel proud about the speed with which it recognised Mr Kelly's entrepreneurial gifts.

"I wasn't the first choice of the panel. In fact, I wasn't even the second choice. I was the third choice," he says.

But the person who was first offered and accepted the job departed after a few weeks, and Mr Kelly found himself, in September 1993, without any formal administrative or managerial experience and an orchestra to run.

He certainly understood the issues from the performer's side. His father, composer and arranger TC Kelly, was a music teacher at Clongowes Wood College, Co Kildare.

He made his first professional appearance at the age of nine, "doing television programmes with my brothers, and concerts with my father". He lived abroad from 1973 until 1988, studying in England and Germany, and then pursuing a career as a freelance musician.

He settled in Ireland again in 1988, more by accident than design. "I was travelling back from the US, intending to go back to Europe."

But back in Dublin, he found himself in demand for gigs.

"I got a taste of the fresh air in Ireland, and hung around. I remember going into the tax office and telling them that I was setting myself up as a self-employed, freelance musician, and they told me that I couldn't be one. There would be only one possible employer for me, that would be RTÉ."

He had to get an accountant to convince them that he could make a living as a freelance performer who also took on teaching work. By 1993, however, he might have been ready to agree with the taxman.

"It just wasn't happening for me here in Ireland. I had to take a good long look at what I was going to do. Was I going to stick around here? Was I going to leave the country again? Or was I going to get into something else?"

It was then that the ICO job came up.

"When I accepted the job, I immediately proposed to the board that we would put players on contract, that we would develop a national touring programme, and develop a commissioning policy for new repertoire. We had the potential within Ireland to develop a really great chamber orchestra.

"Ireland has consistently produced great string talent, albeit that it had emigrated to be educated. The great problem was that very, very few returned home. There wasn't a vehicle here to expose these musicians to the best opportunities.

"You really want to have an orchestra that could not only tour Ireland but tour the world, could attract great conductors and soloists to work with it. That was my goal, to establish a national and international network, and attract back to Ireland some of the best Irish string players."

The board seems to have smiled benignly at his enthusiasm, and allowed him put the proposals to the Arts Council. "The Arts Council came back and said, 'Look, John, great ideas, but we're not going to fund them'."

The orchestra got a repeat grant. He was, he says, "undaunted", regarding this first foray as "a reconnaissance job to see what the lie of the land was".

He went off to the US to make a start on fund-raising and, within 10 days of his return, found an offer on the table from an unexpected quarter.

"I got a phone call from Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin, newly appointed professor of music at the University of Limerick, suggesting we relocate to their campus where the University Concert Hall had just opened. My response was: 'I'll relocate tomorrow, just give me the budget'."

The Arts Council pricked up its ears at the new scenario, and a commitment of £280,000 was made for the first year.

Auditions took place in December 1994 and, in February 1995, the all-new Irish Chamber Orchestra - with an average age of under 30, and with its leader, Fionnuala Hunt, now appointed artistic director - made its first tour to Nenagh, Co Tipperary; Dublin; Schull, Co Cork; and Clonmel, Co Tipperary.

In Ireland, as Mr Kelly points out, there is no real infrastructure for music. There are just three dedicated concert halls in the State, two of them on university campuses. "So, not only were we developing an orchestra, we were developing an infrastructure for concerts. We became promoters, publicists, everything that we had to become."

The musicians were contracted to work 10 days a month, 10 months a year, for fees not far short of a starting salary for a rank-and-file position in the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra which at that time was around £12,000.

The labour market the ICO competes in, Mr Kelly points out, is European, not Irish. And the principle of long rehearsal periods, with lots of repeat performances on tour, helped the young orchestra gell as an ensemble.

The Killaloe Festival was established with just three concerts in 1996 - this year's programme has 13 events. The festival aims to provide, as festivals can, the benefits of an international profile without having to leave the country. It was also planned to attract the orchestra's growing regional audience for a more focused celebration.

Abroad, the orchestra has toured to Italy, France, the Netherlands, Germany, the US, Australia, China, South Korea, and London.

Earlier this year, the ICO became one of the major victims of the Government's cutbacks on arts spending. It was bracketed with non-venue-based production companies, and had its Arts Council grant cut by 19 per cent. The orchestra's accounts for 2001 show an income of 1.134 million, 67 per cent of which came from the Arts Council, 24 per cent from box office, and around 5 per cent from sponsorship. Performing fees account for 51 per cent of expenditure and the total of direct concert-related costs is 77 per cent.

The contraction of concert activity necessitated by the Arts Council cut forced a reduction in the players' contracts, exactly the outcome the council declared it was trying to avoid. The situation is reminiscent of the mythical consultant's report said to have recommended salary savings in a symphony orchestra by dismissing those players - trumpeters, trombonists and percussionists - who only played a small proportion of the time, and redistributing their parts.

The effect has been to move Mr Kelly into high gear. He has brought in Mrs Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland and currently director of the Ethical Globalization Initiative, as chair, with Ed Walsh, former president of the University of Limerick, as her deputy.

He has secured the services of one of the best-known names in violin playing, Nigel Kennedy, for a fund-raising tour that is also being mounted to mark Mrs Robinson's appointment. Mr Kennedy is donating his services, and Allianz has come aboard as sponsor. The cocktail of celebrity guests and sponsorship is one Mr Kelly plans to consume a lot more of.

He's also learned that "you can't take anything for granted. We have to put systems in place now, to ensure that this year's setback won't happen again, that we won't be so reliant on one funder." He talks of developing an endowment fund, a traditional resource for orchestras in the US, where government support of the arts is weak.

He's also joined other leaders in the arts world in protesting publicly - in the Letters page of this newspaper - and lobbying privately about the logic of the Arts Council's 2003 funding decisions. Arts Council cutbacks certainly focus the mind.

Mr Kelly has long nurtured the idea of establishing a new venue, ideally in Killaloe, as an improved base for the festival, and a new home for the orchestra. It would also have potential as a cultural centre - within easy reach of Shannon Airport - with year-round tourism appeal. As he says: "When you give, you get, no matter what area of life you're in."

The ICO performs with Nigel Kennedy in Cork tonight, Limerick tomorrow, Dublin on Sunday and Dingle on Monday. The Killaloe Music Festival runs from Wednesday, July 23rd, to Sunday 27th (1890 923543).