What a coincidence: Friday, March 19th, brought advertisements for three new, senior, music-management posts which give the first clear indication of the shape RTE's director of music, Niall Doyle, wants to impose on the musical activities of the national broadcaster. And that same evening saw a concert which clearly identified some of the malaises which bedevil RTE's major performing asset, the National Symphony Orchestra.
Listening to the concert, I couldn't help being reminded of a Beecham remark, made when he was guesting half a season with the New York Philharmonic in 1936. The orchestra's directors, then confronting the loss of Toscanini, asked Beecham for a musical assessment of the organisation. He offered them the view that, while it contained many excellent players, it was not an orchestra. The point he was making is clear. There are collective musical responses which contribute to the character of orchestral playing which transcend the particular skills and efforts of individual players. The New York Phil, he felt, lacked those qualities in the mid 1930s.
The same has long been true here in Dublin. The closest we have come in my lifetime to having, in Beecham's sense, an orchestra, was in the mid-1980s, when Bryden Thomson was principal conductor of the then RTESO. Thomson's first NCH appearance with the orchestra was the occasion of a remarkable transformation. What had been loose became tight, what had been unfocused became clear, what had been generalised became specific. There were immediate improvements in ensemble, intonation, rhythmic discipline. And, given Thomson's predilections, the music-making replaced a generalised emotionality with a firm sense of purpose and a strongly felt sense of structure. Those textbook phrases about musical architecture took on new meaning. Thomson understood what made symphonic thinking symphonic, and the audiences responded with a warmth that's been almost unrivalled since.
One of the key markers of Thomson's achievement was that the general lift in playing was sustained through other conductor's concerts, as well as his own. George Hurst, who became principal conductor in 1990, when the orchestra was enlarged and re-named the National Symphony Orchestra, brought discipline, too. With a significantly stronger string section, he had options that were simply not available during the Thomson years. But the cultured, almost central-European style he favoured in romantic repertoire remained his alone. Standards for other conductors fluctuated as wildly as ever, and, while the level of technical delivery improved (as, indeed, it has since), the lost sense of orchestral identity was never re-established.
Thomson, of course, was not unique in the musical discipline he brought to the orchestra. Charles Dutoit and Otmar Maga did it in the 1970s, Kees Bakels (famous for having been appointed but never actually having worked as principal conductor) did it in the 1990s. And Alexander Anissimov did, too, which is one of the reasons his appointment as chief guest conductor and later principal conductor occasioned such high expectations. Which brings us to Friday's concert, where Anissimov's work was in many respects unrecognisable as that of the man of whom so many high hopes had been held.
The opening of Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony brought uncertainty of ensemble. Throughout the programme the orchestra engaged in persistent middle-ranging of dynamics (especially the strings, who even failed to notice specific shushing hand-waving from the conductor). Balances were not well judged (the strings frequently obliterated the woodwind), and the general response to the conductor's relaxed speeds was of a lethargy which completely undermined his approach. What can have gone wrong? Where was the spirit-lifting Anissimov of yore? Why has the orchestra become so overwhelmingly unresponsive to the most exciting conductor they've had in more than a decade? The only answers I've come up with are depressing.
ON the one hand, it seems that, collectively, the orchestra may be turning things on their heads, regarding the whole institution of concert-giving as being about their needs. Instead of them being there to serve the conductor and the audience, conductors are now there to serve them and the audience to pay them. Why else would they play with such unresponsiveness under their principal conductor, or stand and look at the audience with such apparent sullenness at the end of a piece? The last work on Friday's programme, Smetana's From Bohemia's Woods and Fields did bring a degree of animation to both playing and stage manner. But through the rest of the evening, the orchestra's collective demeanour was worlds away from the responsive eagerness which used to be characteristic of their work under Anissimov.
There's no denying the fact that the orchestra has not been well treated by its employers for the best part of 15 years, now. There was RTE's failure to extend Thomson's contract. Relations with other principal conductors were not always easy: Hurst resigned 15 months into his contract. There was a protracted period without any principal conductor at all. And, with a background of lacklustre, not to say misguided, artistic decision-making (of which the high profile given to Gerry Murphy's feeble Dialects is only the most recent), there have been plenty of grounds for being depressed.
In an interview on this page last September, Anissimov - who has managed to fire audience enthusiasm like no-one since the Thomson years - touched on some of these issues. He expressed a wish for the orchestra's achievement to be more even. For the back desks to be as good as the firsts. For the playing to be emotional, "professionally emotional", all the time, for other conductors and not just for him. And for the orchestra to maintain "by itself" a level of playing below which it would never go, no matter what the limitations encountered in any particular conductor.
Anissimov has produced some first-rate music-making in the intervening months, but the standard of playing which even he can consistently get has now itself become an issue. If the principal conductor is in the situation where the excellent players respond, but the community of spirit is not that which makes an orchestra an orchestra, then we're back where we were before. The challenges facing the shortly-to-be-appointed general manager are greater now than anyone would have imagined even last September, at the beginning of Anissimov's first season as principal conductor.
