Madam, - I paid my first visit to the National Basketball Arena in Tallaght for the performance of Mahler's Eighth Symphony on May 26th and a deeply unsatisfactory experience it proved to be.
Directional signage from the M50 is so poor that I ended up in Tallaght village asking for help; I wasn't the only concert-goer with this problem.
Access to the arena seems wholly inadequate and was very poorly supervised that night. This resulted in members of the audience still struggling in some 40 minutes after the performance should have begun.
The extremely uncomfortable seating was so arranged that 50 per cent of the audience was sideways on to the performers. This, coupled with dismal acoustics, generated such a distortion to the sound that I for one found it impossible to follow the melody being played.
As to the performance, I believe that your Michael Dervan summed it up pretty well in his critique. Shame on Dublin that such a work should have to be performed in such an inadequate venue.
After the performance we sat in our cars unmoving for just short of an hour before finally managing to get out of the place - never, as far as I am concerned, to return.
Quite how, say, an ambulance might have got in and out through this congestion I just can't imagine.
What a dismal conclusion to the National Symphony Orchestra's season. - Yours, etc,
VINCENT MacCARTHY, Fordstown, Co Meath.