Peter Crawley talks to Brian Byrne, conductor, composer and consummate entertainer, who returns to the National Concert Hall from LA next week
Anyone who has seen Brian Byrne perform will not be surprised to hear how he proposed to his girlfriend. During the interval of his last appearance at the National Concert Hall, he sent for her with a simple request: he needed his shirt ironed. "I knew that would go down like a lead balloon," he grimaces. "What's wrong with you?" she demanded, understandably, when she arrived at the conductor's room. Byrne locked the door and went down on bended knee.
It hadn't come completely out of the blue. "I wanted to surprise her. And the last place she would dream about would be somewhere I'm working, because when I'm working my mind is 100 per cent focused on the job."
And if she had said no?
"It would have been a terrible second half," he laughs. Byrne's proposal reflects his approach to work. It shows the rigorous preparation of a classical music scholar, the playfully discordant note of a man who cannot resist a cheap gag, and the joyful fillip of a jazz improviser. In his arrangements and compositions, Byrne's wide influences conspire to delight in the most unlikely places. He is a master of the surprise.
The son of a barber and amateur musician, Byrne grew up in Navan surrounded by scissors and scales: Byrnes Hairdresser has been a Navan institution for more than a century and Brian's great grandfather, granduncle and uncle were all barbers. "Anybody who has hair in Navan has probably got it cut in a Byrnes hairdresser," he says. "But thankfully it didn't rub off on me."
Instead, his earliest memories are of chewing the side of the family's Wurlitzer organ as his father transcribed pop tunes for his wedding band. "As far back as two or three, I remember being completely immersed in music. I remember playing Merrily We Roll Along when I was three and I couldn't reach the pedals."
Between stints in his father's wedding band and classical piano classes in the Royal Irish Academy of Music, he absorbed the pop of Billy Joel and Nat King Cole while simultaneously practising Mozart and Bach. Yet it was his first exposure to jazz, courtesy of an Oscar Peterson record, that really dazzled him. "I didn't want to play the piano after hearing it," he says. "It just blinded me what one person could do on a piano."
He persisted though, and his marriage of studious musicianship with popular entertainment continued through college, where he studied classical and jazz piano in Scotland, while willingly adopting various other styles - any way to make a buck, as he puts it. "You'd play a piano bar one night, in a trad band the night after, a jazz bar the next, and then do harpsichord in an Edinburgh art gallery. Anything that would pay the way." For a music student, paying the rent can be a potent muse.
Film composing was an obvious direction as it demands diverse musical interests; film composers may often be overlooked, but in terms of style they must be all-knowing.
For a while Byrne contributed to movie soundtracks in Ireland, but Irish cinema, with its half-a-handful of directors and their solid allegiances, seemed like a closed shop. So in the summer of 2003, Byrne moved to Los Angeles to make it in the movies.
His introduction to Hollywood came with a commission to ghostwrite a score in a hurry for an established composer on an animated movie. "It's this bittersweet thing," says Byrne. "It's done and it sounds great, but it's under another person's name. It's your music, but it's not your music. It's a horrible feeling and I'll never do it again."
The experience grew more surreal when he would hear his niece and nephew singing scenes from his secret score, but he has resigned himself to his uncredited debut. "In Los Angeles everything is business before it's music," he reasons. "So it kind of hardens you up."
Indeed, Byrne now sounds like a pretty hard man, tough enough to understand the vagaries of the entertainment industry - his next score will be for an Irish-themed Disney movie, titled The Banshee, which is currently in what film people grimly refer to as "preproduction". It is due to begin production in six months. "That could mean two years," says Byrne sombrely. Meanwhile he has been asked to co-write songs for Christina Aguilera's new R&B album, another gamble that could be quite lucrative - if his songs are chosen.
Byrne frequently talks about music in financial terms, combining the pragmatism of the skint music student and the bottom-line mentality of life in Hollywood. He has done his share of "money gigs", he admits, and arranging is simply "bread and butter work", but he is happiest when conducting a symphony orchestra through one of his own compositions or playing piano in a jazz trio.
"Entertainment should go hand in hand with good music or a good performance. If you make people laugh they'll be on your side when you play the serious stuff." u
Brian Byrne conducts the RTÉ Concert Orchestra & Big Band in Swinging in a Winter Wonderland at the National Concert Hall (01-4170000) on Tuesday and at the Helix (01-7007000) on Friday and next Saturday.