There are a number of reasons to be quietly optimistic. With the transfer having now taken place, the question on everybody’s mind is whether the orchestra will receive better treatment in their new abode than they did at RTÉ. It was quite unsettling for the players because we had no idea of the timeline. Even when official requests were put in, they were met with deaf ears. According to one of the players I spoke with, this attitude continued during the transfer process:Īs an orchestra, we were kept in the dark all the way through the process. Operational difficulties, a lack of communication and an absence of artistic vision had resulted in what the report termed ‘the development of a highly charged, inward and mistrustful culture in the orchestras’ which greatly hindered any prospects of cultivating a creatively productive atmosphere.
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While it is true that a large part of the issues at RTÉ were due to the station’s financial predicament, the Boaden report was strongly critical of the management’s approach to the orchestra which exacerbated the problems. Not surprisingly, the reliance on freelancers to fill the gap has had a demoralising effect on the remaining full-time players who often do not know who they will be playing alongside from one week to the next.ĭespite Director-General of RTÉDee Forbes’ contention that the day was one of ‘mixed emotions’, the real truth, I believe, is that RTÉ could not be happier that the NSO has been released from its care as it was increasingly viewed by the station as simply a financial burden. The list of ‘current’ players on the RTÉ website totals 72 but several of the names have long since retired indicating, rather alarmingly, that the orchestra’s current strength is closer to its inception figure of 62 in 1948 than its peak strength in the early 1990s. Since the economic crash of 2008–9, however, the orchestra bore a disproportionate share of RTÉ’s ongoing financial difficulties and endured several years without a principal conductor and multiple vacancies that continue to remain unfilled. Under Gerhard Markson, who took over as principal conductor in 2001, the orchestra notched up several notable achievements with performances of complete cycles of the Mahler and Shostakovich symphonies alongside important works by Irish composers such as Gerald Barry’s opera The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant.
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Its collaboration with the Naxos label resulted in complete recordings of the symphonies of Carl Nielsen and Malcolm Arnold along with a series of orchestral recordings of Irish composers such as Gerald Barry, Raymond Deane and Seóirse Bodley amongst others. Its ascension to the title of the ‘National Symphony Orchestra’ in 1990 was, according to Kehoe in the Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland, ‘a belated official acknowledgement of what had long been apparent: that the orchestra had, even if only by default, become an indispensable national asset.’ĭespite the piecemeal development, the 1990s and 2000s constituted something of a golden period for the orchestra. The orchestra endured a colourful history in its early years (documented here in a wonderful doctoral dissertation by Joe Kehoe) and gradually built up its strength from an initial 62 players to a figure of 89 by the early 1990s. Last week’s transfer was the culmination of a near four-year process to implement Boaden’s principal recommendation.įounded in 1948 as the Raidió Éireann Symphony Orchestra, its creation was the result of a gradual building up of the station’s musical capacities that had begun with just a septet (string sextet and piano) when Ireland’s first radio service was established in 1926. Overseen by former director of BBC Radio Helen Boaden, the report, published in April of 2018, recommended that the NSO be transferred to the NCH and funded directly by the government.
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The orchestra’s transfer to the National Concert Hall was the last step in a process that began in November 2017 when RTÉ commissioned the media consultancy firm Mediatique to undertake an independent review of the broadcaster’s orchestral activities. Monday 24th of January 2022 was an important day in the history of Irish music in that it marked the end of the 74-year association of the National Symphony Orchestra with the state broadcaster RTÉ.