It is always difficult during this season when carol singers appear to be camped at every street corner and performances of Messiah are taking place across the country to concede that modern-day Ireland, for all its diverse music, has not consolidated a great church choral tradition comparable to that in many European countries. But then the leading Irish church choirs have tended to be Protestant and many people who delight in the music of Handel at Christmas and Easter give little thought to polyphonic music during the rest of the year.
Choir director Ite O'Donovan is determined, however, to supply this missing tradition and to encourage as large an audience as possible to enjoy the glories of church music spanning the centuries from the late Renaissance, to Baroque, Classical, Romantic, to 20th-century composers such as Britten and Durufle, and onto the present. Music, she believes, is for everyone and while there is nothing dogmatic or elitist in her approach, her enthusiasm could well convert a nation into singers - or at least, informed listeners. From 1982 until 1995 she was the director of the Palestrina Choir at the Pro-Cathedral in Dublin. Last year she founded the Dublin Choral Foundation with its two main choirs: the Lassus Scholars and a junior section, the Piccolo Lasso, and then invited Dr Veronica Dunne to act as patron. In this, their first year, the choirs have already performed Mozart's Coronation Mass, his Requiem, Schubert's Mass in G and Mass in C and have also performed Faure's Requiem. She enjoys the challenge of bringing them through a piece under pressure - such as last June, learning the Mozart Requiem in six hours of rehearsal over three weeks.
"I was fascinated to see how quickly the children in particular came to terms with this difficult fugal piece in such a short time." Once such pieces are in the repertoire, "they can be polished and prepared for performance at very short notice". Their debut album, Sing Choirs Of Angels, a recording of Christmas music including standards such as Joy To The World, Hark! The Herald Angels Sing and O Come All Ye Faithful, as well as O'Donovan's arrangements of Thainig na Saoithe and Suantrai na Maighdine and pieces by the English composer John Rutter, appears set to be a Christmas best-seller.
Intent on extending choral music to everyone, O'Donovan is not a campaigner but has a simple philosophy. "I think music is the ultimate communication: it is life-sustaining, it is life. It's not that I'm planning on teaching the nation to sing - that would be impossible - but I believe it's by providing really good performances of choral music to people who would not normally be exposed to it that listeners can be totally uplifted and participate in the overall spiritual - and I say spiritual not religious - experience of the music."
A life in music does sound wonderful. Conducting seems a glamorous profession with its dramatic images of Daniel Barenboim, Claudio Abbado or Ashkenazy taking the podium and leading the great orchestras of the world. O'Donovan is involved in orchestral conducting as well as directing choirs. And if there is a limited choral tradition in Ireland, there is an even smaller one in conducting - and no name of a female orchestral conductor leaps to mind. To date she has already conducted the Irish Chamber Orchestra throughout the Mozart Mass series in 1991; the Dublin Orchestral Players, the Dublin Baroque Players and, earlier this year, conducted the Dublin String Ensemble. She has also directed numerous orchestras in the Czech Republic, including the Bohuslav Martinu Philharmonic, Zlin; the Beethoven Chamber Orchestra of Ostrava and the Zilina Chamber Orchestra of Slovakia.
Ite O'Donovan, who also teaches at the DIT Conservatory of Music (still more fondly known as the College of Music) is a one-woman band who not only makes the music but also carries out the more practical aspects of choir administration, including ordering music, planning concerts, writing the programme notes, typesetting the programmes and is currently transporting the new CDs to their distributors.
"I'm a control freak," she jokes before quickly protesting, "no I'm not - it's just easier to do it." She is small, spare with quick, darting movements and looks as if stress is her natural medium - "it's not, I've learnt to live with it" - and is a fast, funny talker.
Her years in Dublin have not altered her Meath accent - "it's not really a Meath accent, it's a mix" - and her conversation has a roller-coaster dimension, racing from the subject of Timmy O Suil Amhain - now Timmy Gan Suil Amhain - her blind, 17-year-old cat, "he used to have one eye, now he has none", to the life of Orlande de Lassus (1532-1594) whom she named her choirs after. The most celebrated - and possibly most prolific late Renaissance composer - Flanders-born Lassus wrote more than 2,000 madrigals.
"Lassus was such a good choir boy he was kidnapped three times before he was 12." He mastered every style and although he wrote sacred music, including Mass settings and motets, he was more committed to secular music than Palestrina and certainly had a greater range. Lassus was the more versatile and was widely published during his life. O'Donovan refers to him being more secular than Palestrina.
"Next season I'm hoping to do Lassus's great double choir composition, Missa Vinum Bonum, she says and agrees that an element of subversive humour had a part in naming her choirs after him. Conservatism helped secure Palestrina's subsequent prominent position; his reputation has in the past overshadowed his contemporaries. "In actual fact the music of Lassus and Victoria is far more colourful, more technically challenging - with his shorter phrases, you can't miss a beat - and I think more interesting than Palestrina's." From the age of 16 O'Donovan has been involved in church music; initially at St Mary's Church in Navan, Co Meath where she played the organ and on to Our Lady of Victories, in Sallynoggin, Co Dublin, where she became choir director and St Mary's Church in Haddington Road where she was organist. Starting so young might give the impression that O'Donovan enjoyed much privilege and was encouraged to develop her gifts. However, her early years were very hard. Born in 1956, the third of six children of a west Cork couple who had moved to Co Meath when she was three, O'Donovan had a tough childhood in which music would seem to have had little importance. Yet books and music proved her great refuge. Her father's heavy drinking and his long absences meant there was no money and music lessons were a luxury.
It was her mother, Ite O Cuileanain, who first encouraged her to learn piano. Later on the nuns at the Mercy Convent in Navan generously provided free music tuition. O'Donovan witnessed her mother's years of hardship and learnt a great deal about the different ways in which people respond to difficulty. Of her father who died in 1979 she says: "I didn't really know him but I know I inherited the music from him. He had played euphonium in the Skibbereen band. He could take up any instrument and make a sound from it. The influences on my mother's side of the family were mainly Irish language scholars . . . an leat" to her mother as a child on her way to school. "It took me a while as a kid in school to under-stand why the other children said goodbye. Irish was my first language on my mother's side and she spoke it at home with us. But of course with the coming of television in the 1960s, English took over."
On leaving the Mercy Convent in 1973, she went to Carysfort College in Dublin to train as a primary teacher. "It was the last year that Carysfort had a twoyear diploma course. It was an easier studying option time-wise and meant I could start earning more quickly. I remember when I was going off to Blackrock, being told by the local priest Father Daly that I should really be studying music. He had sent me to church music courses. But confidence in my musical ability, or rather a lack of confidence, was really at the heart of my decision." She was a good primary teacher. "I have always enjoyed teaching. But you know there was a point when I asked myself was I a primary teacher doing music as a hobby or was I a musician who happened to have found myself teaching?"
In 1975 she began teaching at Scoil Chaitriona in Coolock on Dublin's northside and stayed there for five years before moving to St Attracta's Senior School, Ballinteer in south Dublin, where she was vice-principal. Teaching and studying quickly developed a parallel pattern for her. "On my first day teaching at Scoil Chaitriona, I also had a piano exam." While teaching she had begun a Mus. B at Trinity College where she was an external student. She qualified in 1981, winning the Prout & Stewart Award en route. Within five years of graduating, she had resigned from primary teaching, joined the staff of the College of Music as a part-time teacher, taken up the directorship of the Palestrina Choir and had completed an MA in Renaissance music at Queen's University, Belfast.
Attending the polyphonic and plain chant music course at Dalgan Park outside Navan as a teenager had begun her interest in early music. As an external student she had studied the organ with Peter Sweeney and had taken composition with his brother Eric at the College of Music. However, she had had to read the history of music course by herself and had become particularly drawn to the music of the Renaisssance, the early Baroque of Charpentier, Vivaldi, Telemann, Monteverdi and the later Baroque of Handel, Buxtehude and, of course, his famous disciple, J.S. Bach - whose work she had begun playing as a schoolgirl organist.
In March 1982, she became the fourth director - and first woman - appointed to the Palestrina Choir. Founded in 1902, by the early 1980s the choir was largely living on its former reputation and had a limited repertoire. It had, however, survived the ravages of Vatican II - "with its disbanding of church choirs throughout Ireland in the vain hope of encouraging congregational singing".
Within 12 months, she had expanded the repertoire to include 15 Masses and 40 motets and the choir had participated in major works such as Stravinsky's Perseph- one and Mahler's Third Symphony at the National Concert Hall. New music was being learnt and performed every week. During that time she also had to contend with a large number of voices breaking - the boys' section being completely replaced within 18 months.
Over the next decade the choir acquired an international reputation, primarily through its participation in Pueri Cantores, international choral conventions. As the standard improved, more and more good young male singers such as Emmanuel Lawler - who had started there as a choir boy - Andrew Murphy, Ciaran Rocks and Jack O'Kelly emerged. Some of the major performances included Britten's War Requiem, Gerard Victory's Ultima Rerum, Bach's St Matthew Passion and appearances at Westminster Abbey, Westminster Cathedral, St Peter's Basilica in Rome, St Patrick's Cathedral New York and at Palestrina in 1994 when launching the composer's 400th anniversary celebrations. From 1989 until 1995, she directed all the College of Music choirs, from junior choir to choral society and travelled with the latter to Moscow in 1994 where they performed Orff's Carmina Burana and Faure's Requiem.
Of her new choir she says: "My aim is not to teach music but to teach young people how to be musicians. The cathedral choral tradition is changing and my work with Dublin Choral Foundation aims to provide a non-denominational musical education for boys and girls in which high standards are achieved without the more repressive time commitment. Parents don't want children confined to one activity - and music is time-consuming. It is a labour of love - to see young children take up the challenge of learning, performing and really enjoying major works like Mozart, Schubert and Handel makes it all the more worthwhile. And at the moment it still is a labour of love, but eventually I hope to set up a trust fund."
Her CV gives the impression of an individual driven by ambition. But she appears interested and curious rather than obsessed. In 1990 she began seriously studying orchestral conducting and still remembers being put to one side in an early masterclass after about 10 minutes. "I didn't know what was wrong, I had done a lot of conducting. But it was not until I went to the Czech Republic and was studying under Kirk Trevor that I realised it was simply a matter of technique - of keeping my hands too high." Orchestral conductors direct lower than their choral counterparts.
Barenboim is her ideal conductor. "He has a phenomenal conducting technique, he has great insight into the music, his physical gestures vary according to the style of music - because he actually personifies the music he is conducting. I would go anywhere within reason to see him conduct." She also admires Harnoncourt, Abbado, John Eliot Gardiner and the German-based Israeli Mahler interpreter, Eliahu Inbal.
She will be 42 on January 28th - "born 200 years and a day after Mozart" (the person from the past she would most like to meet). The reason she still lives alone in her small artisan's dwelling with Timmy the cat is simple, she says. "For years I had this romantic notion acquired as a young avid reader that men were strong, brave and noble. All the heroes in romantic stories had courage, integrity, depth and compassion. I have this idea about a man who is loving, generous, intelligent and good. I'm still looking, and at this stage, I've been waiting so long, he'd want to be rich as well."
Sing Choirs of Angels performed by The Lassus Scholars and Piccolo Lasso directed by Ite O'Donovan is available on CD and cassette (Dublin Choral Foundation, at £9.99)
The Lassus Scholars and Piccolo Lasso will sing a Service of Nine Lessons and Carols in Adam and Eve's Church, Merchants Quay, Dublin this Sunday at 7 p.m. and will perform Schubert's Mass in C in the same church on Christmas Day.
