ArtScape Deirdre Falvey
Kilkenny Arts Festival has just appointed Geraldine Tierney, a chief executive officer with a business rather than an arts background. The festival, which has developed over the past seven or eight years from one that was primarily classical music and visual art into a multiple art form, 10-day August event, went ahead without an artistic director this year following the departure of Claudia Woolgar.
The board drew on a number of specialists to finish putting the 2005 programme together, and was very happy with how it worked out. The festival initially explored the possibility of appointing an artistic director, advertising in the summer, but opted instead for a chief executive.
Incoming board chairman Fergus Cronin said: "We have an absolute belief that expert curators are the best way to ensure the diversity of the art forms, and their integrity. And the board is convinced that one person, with clear CEO responsibility and business acumen in a parallel role, to look after the business, marketing, management and presentation of the festival, is the best way to go."
Tierney - originally from Kilkenny, and whose own artistic interests are literature and music - has worked at a high level in retail for years in Britain and Ireland (Harrods, the Arcadia Group, Dunnes Stores), most recently as merchandise director with the Brown Thomas Group.
Maeve Butler, who has just left as administrator of Barnstorm Theatre Company, joins the festival as programme co-ordinator. And the festival will again be curated by specialist programmers: Carol McGonnell (New York-based clarinettist), Rose Parkinson (former artistic director of Galway Arts Festival), Mike Fitzpatrick (Limerick City Gallery of Art), Gerry Godley (Improvised Music Company, jazz promoter and broadcaster), Emer McGowan (Draíocht director), Eoin McNamee (novelist, poet and screenwriter) and Seamus Purcell (scientist, pyrotechnics expert and street spectacle performer-director). There are some new faces here, but Fitzpatrick, Godley and McGowan were involved in programming the 2005 festival.
Banville's Booker bonanza
Winning the Booker certainly gets results. By the beginning of this week, sales of The Sea in Britain and Ireland had topped 100,000, and John Banville's novel is now on its 12th print-run. The novel had sold 20,000 copies by the time it was shortlisted in September, and within hours publishers Picador had ordered a reprint of 14,000 copies. They were all gone from the warehouse by the time he won, and Picador reprinted a further 24,000 copies that week. Since the Booker win on October 10th, The Sea has sold 68,000 copies. Which must add up to a nice packet of royalties, aside from the prize money. And publication in the US - by Knopf, part of Random House - was brought forward from next March to last month on foot of the Booker win.
Fat lady sings for Doran
The ousting of Seán Doran as artistic director and chief executive of English National Opera was quickly executed, writes Michael Dervan. The immediate promotion of John Berry and Loretta Tomasi to become - respectively - artistic director and chief executive was intended to be decisive. But things at ENO have unravelled with all the inevitability of a tired opera plot. ENO's chairman, millionaire financier Martin Smith, had hoped to limit the public damage of Doran's sudden departure by avoiding a protracted public competition to recruit a successor. But he achieved exactly the opposite through promotions that blithely ignored Arts Council of England recruitment guidelines.
Distinguished opera practitioners wrote letters of protest to the Guardian and the Times and also directly to the ENO board. The Guardian also published a leader article targeting the board, and Smith in particular.
Better options than the new regime were touted by virtually everyone with an interest in the matter. Members of the Bectu union, representing theatre workers at ENO, are holding a ballot on strike action over a recent pay offer, and the Times has reported "a black hole" in the company's finances "the size of Brünhilde".
Far from keeping ENO on track, Doran's departure and the hasty elevation of Berry and Tomasi have led to the resignation of the chairman. Smith, who has found himself taking most of the flak for what were actually board decisions, has accused the media of "persistent hostility towards the board, and in particular to me".
The company, Smith also told the board in his letter of resignation, "is in the best shape that it has been in for many years".
Doran has not been available for comment on his departure. He cannot, however, have been pleased by some of the press coverage surrounding his downfall.
The Daily Telegraph's Rupert Christiansen stuck to his line that "Doran is a pleasant and well-intentioned man, but he should never have been given the job in the first place".
The Times's Richard Morrison is kinder. "For all his perceived weaknesses (not least his inability to stop an internal whispering campaign against him) Doran had articulated a vision for ENO that was not merely about being a cut-price Covent Garden. He attempted to widen the definition of opera to include Broadway musicals and world music."
In the Guardian, Mark Lawson suggested: "Paradoxically, Doran has been shown the door at a time when the coffers (with box office takings up and a Sky sponsorship deal in place) are fuller than for some time and the repertoire is meeting with unusual public approval: Anthony Minghella's Madam Butterfly is a second recent hit, following Bernstein's On the Town. Doran has also achieved an unusually high level of publicity with his 'lesbian sex shocker' opera (Gerald Barry's The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant) and a performance by the ENO chorus at the Glastonbury Festival. But for all they do to meet government 'accessibility' targets, Minghella, Bernstein, Kant and Glastonbury enrage the purist reviewers, and Doran seems never to have had the full confidence of his staff."
In part, Doran's problems were those of opera itself. It's an art form that harbours notorious conservatism, and is conspicuously failing to develop and renew its repertoire. His response was to broaden that repertoire base, as in Barry's Petra and a new work commissioned to Asian Dub Foundation.
He also aspired to bring ENO, where everything is sung in English, more work that was originally written in the language (such as by Benjamin Britten and Vaughan Williams) rather than opera in translation. He even gave an airing to Shadowtime by the high king of musical complexity, Brian Ferneyhough.
He brought in the surtitles that purists dread - a tacit acknowledgement of the Coliseum's text-mangling acoustic. His agenda was one of major change, and whatever about his managerial shortcomings, his early exit has to be at least partly due to what management-speak terms "the vulnerability of the change agent".
Dublin tribute to Ginsberg
"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked dragging themselves through the Negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix."
With these lines, Allen Ginsberg gave the beat poetry movement its most famous (and infamous) work, Howl. Next year marks the 50th anniversary of the first reading of the poem in San Francisco in 1957, when Lawrence Ferlinghetti, owner of City Lights Books, which published Howl, was arrested on obscenity charges, writes Gerry Smyth.
On Thursday, January 5th Ginsberg's epic work of spontaneous free-flow verse will be read by a group of Irish admirers, including comedian Tommy Tiernan, poet Theo Dorgan, and journalist Eamonn McCann. The reading, which will take place in the Sugar Club on Dublin's Leeson Street at 8pm, is in aid of Down syndrome.
When Ginsberg died in 1997 he was laid out in a tweed suit presented to him by Dorgan as payment for a reading he gave in 1993 in Liberty Hall.
Other participants in the reading will include Fergus Finlay, Tony Curtis, and Dermod Moore, and after the reading BP Fallon will pay Ginsberg a musical tribute.
Tickets cost €25, and are available from www.ticketmaster.ie.