Madam, - Sean McGouran suggests (March 6th) that the première on Lyric FM of Jerome De Bromhead's Second Symphony was "a more important cultural event in Ireland" than the première of John Tavener's Requiem.
As it happens, I was lucky enough to hear the first performance of the symphony in the National Concert Hall and, whatever about its cultural importance, I have no doubt about its value as a work of art.
But Mr McGouran's point is worth approaching from another angle. De Bromhead and Tavener are, in their different ways, great artists and it would be a pity if one were to suffer for the advancement of the other. But that would seem to be the way of the world - in the free market of fame, just as in the market of more material goods, the bigger the push the bigger the pull.
This is not to say, however, that nothing can be done about the inequality. Small countries, particularly wealthy ones like our own, are able to focus their influence in ways that larger nations can't. The fact that Sean McGouran writes from London, for example, leads me to wonder what Londoners know of the work of De Bromhead and other outstanding contemporary composers here. Very little, I fear. And yet to bring to London an annual festival of contemporary Irish music or to engage in the consistent promotion of new works there for an extended period - perhaps a première every month for a year - would not be inordinately expensive and would pay huge cultural dividends.
All of this presupposes, of course, that we are sufficiently independent to listen to Tavener and De Bromhead, to delight in both and, without being chauvinistic or provincial, to give a special value to our own "native wood-notes wild". - Yours, etc,
BRIAN LYNCH, Seafield Road, Killiney, Co Dublin.