For those of us who weren't around in the 1940s, it's easy to imagine the Ireland of the time as an island of isolation. The war and Ireland's neutrality, the scarcity of essential resources, the much-used power lever between Church and State, the absence of modern global communications; all are factors which colour the view of a decade in which Ireland can seem to have been alone and stagnant. Yet times of oppression - and who can not have been oppressed by the war and its aftermath? - often stimulate the human spirit to feats of resilience and adventure. Musical life in Belfast had flourished in the depressed 1930s, and Dublin found a new sense of vitality in the 1940s. Ardent young men of musical action, composers Frederick May, Brian Boydell and Aloys Fleischmann among them, were making their mark. The Music Association of Ireland was founded, bringing concerts to the regions and spear-heading a campaign for a concert hall. And the young state's German-flavoured Army School of Music was training conductors who had a lot more in their hearts than beating time to military marches.
When supplies are limited, it can make sense to share. So the army men, who had been trained by Colonel Fritz Brase, were loaned for other duties, surfacing in the opera pit and in front of a small radio orchestra, swollen by other army personnel to satisfy the requirements of symphonic music.
Army men were seconded to the broadcasting service as directors of music, and the concerts that were run in the 2,300-seater Capitol Cinema under Lieutenant (later Captain) Michael Bowles were successful enough to enliven at a political level the idea of establishing a symphony orchestra. Political interest in music at the time must have been high, for there is a report on a series of concerts in the late 1930s which records "the majority of the Cabinet attending each of them".
In 1947, the Radio Eireann Symphony Orchestra was established with 62 permanent players, a dramatic development from the core of four musicians employed by the station at the start of Irish broadcasting in 1926. The Radio Eireann Annual Report for 1947 documents programmes for 52 orchestral concerts, many of them adventurous beyond today's wildest imaginings, and including 18 pieces by Irish composers, 20 per cent more than the NSO clocked up last year, and double the average of the five years from 19921996.
The playing may not have been as polished as audiences would expect today, but the enterprise was exciting and the conducting of regular visitor Jean Martinon in his native French music is still remembered with especial fondness by those who heard it. Martinon would later take charge of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. He recorded the complete orchestral works of Debussy and Ravel with French orchestras, and many of these recordings still hold their place in the CD catalogue.
RTE's music department has shown in the recent past a knack of finding friction with conductors. One thinks of Kees Bakels, the principal conductor who never was. He fell out with management between negotiating his contract and taking up his post. Similar glitches were not unknown in the early days either, when what was then the Department of Posts & Telegraphs was capable of a hands-on approach unimaginable in the 1990s. RTE's first full-time director of music, the ex-army Michael Bowles, departed with amazing speed, not even surviving to conduct the formal opening concert which is being commemorated tomorrow. Bowles, now in his late 80s and living in Dublin, later took up conducting posts in New Zealand and the US, and wrote a book on conducting which carries a commendation by no less a figure than Adrian Boult.
Bowles had trawled post-war Europe to find players for the new orchestras - the much smaller Radio Eireann Light Orchestra was also part of the extraordinary 1947 initiative - and a broad mixture of nationalities was to remain one of the symphony orchestra's features for much of its life. The political upheavals in Hungary in 1956 would later also provide new players for Dublin, among them violinist Janos Furst. His was a star that would rise. He conducted the original, 1960s Irish Chamber Orchestra, was the first leader of the Ulster Orchestra, and returned to Dublin to become the principal conductor of the RTESO in 1987.
Having escaped from Hungary and completed his musical education in Paris and Brussels, he auditioned successfully for the Royal Orchestra in Copenhagen. The unions, however, were not sure how many foreigners were going to be admitted. In the meantime, a close friend vouched for him and he came to Ireland without having been auditioned for the Radio Eireann Symphony Orchestra, on the understanding that he could do the audition after he had arrived. "I got the contract before I could sign the Danish contract, so November 16th, 5.30 in the afternoon, in 1958, I arrived to Ireland. And it rained. It was so depressing I wanted to turn back. The British Isles red-brick was something that was so depressing to me, with the rain and the low cloud and at that time not very bright street lights.
"They caught me in the customs hall and said, `What is this?' I said `That's a violin' and they said, `Do you play this?' I explained what I was coming to do and they said, `That's not enough, will you play it?' So I played it. They listened and they said, `Play some more'. So I played some more. That was my first concert in Ireland, it was very funny, in the customs hall in Dublin Airport."
The orchestra became an international melting pot, Hungarians in the trumpet section, a horn player from Yugoslavia, wind players from France and Germany, string players from here, there and everywhere. The challenge of welding the disparate styles into a cohesive whole was daunting and, even by the 1970s when my own regular concert-going began, one not readily resolved. The authoritarian Tibor Paul, who combined the roles of principal conductor and director of music in the 1960s, may well have managed the trick. But, as with most of the orchestra's work beyond the recent past, his conducting is simply not documented in the output of FM3.
Paul was a martinet, "a conductor of the old school," according to Janos Furst, "who modelled himself on people like Reiner and Szell, an authoritarian to the extreme," and a man "who could not take a single tiny word of criticism ever passed on him. He disciplined the orchestra without a question. He built programmes, he opened up doors."
Paul was followed in 1968 by the much-loved Albert Rosen, a Czech whose exciting bare-hearted emotionalism was not always counterparted by disciplined ensemble or sharp responsiveness to musical style. Colman Pearce, a great champion of Irish music and an astute programme builder, didn't manage to deliver the performances that might have matched his aspirations when, in 1982, he succeeded Rosen after a period of joint principal conductorship. Pearce was followed by Scotsman Bryden Thomson, whose musical discipline, concern with detail (he liked, he said, to hear even the shortest notes clearly), fine grasp of musical structure, wide-ranging sympathies and absorbing programmes (his three years brought important cycles of Beethoven, Sibelius, Nielsen and Bruckner) marked his three years with the orchestra as a sort of golden age.
When Janos Furst returned, he brought an ear of greater sensual refinement but in major works the bigger picture often remained out of focus and his greatest achievements were in large choral-orchestral works with clearly sectionalised structures.
Furst left early, conducting not a single concert in the last five months of his term. I met him backstage at the NCH on the day RTE announced the expansion of his orchestra to 93 players and its relaunch as the National Symphony Orchestra. Although he had been in the building for rehearsals, he hadn't been invited, he told me, to the reception where the announcement was made.
His successor, George Hurst, whose music-making espoused a Teutonic gravitas and breadth, departed 15 months into his term in March 1991, in the face of industrial tension following cutbacks at RTE. The effects of this particular management failure are still being felt. The orchestra has even today not managed to reach the "international strength" of 93 players promised by RTE in 1989. The orchestra's post-Hurst fortunes have been variable. The Bakels episode, already mentioned, had elements of absurdist drama, and the current incumbent, Kasper de Roo, has proved largely an artistic disappointment. On the other hand, the orchestra's recording activity has brought its name to international attention, and the work of Irish composers is at last being featured on CD. And Alexander Anissimov, currently principal guest conductor and due to succeed de Roo from next season, has managed to tap the players' potential with rewarding consistency.
Tomorrow's Golden Jubilee Concert aside, the jubilee season, seriously curtailed by the standards of even five years ago, lacks the essential thread of imaginative programming and choice of artist that is so needed to invigorate a body that has become weighed down by poor artistic input and developmental neglect. The imminent arrival of Anissimov and a new director of music could be the signal for change. But RTE has long tended to trade on its monopoly position, arguing (with the tacit consent of the Arts Council, which saved money this way) that, without its beneficence, there simply wouldn't be any orchestral concerts in Dublin. Just as, there wouldn't be any air travel without Aer Lingus. It's high time for the weight of that tradition of thought to be ditched. The Irish Chamber Orchestra has shown what can be achieved - and how quickly - when the approach is fresh and imaginative. It's surely time now for the National Symphony Orchestra, one way or another, to be freed up to follow suit.
