For 50 years and more, the national broadcasting service has been a key player in the musical life of this State. The establishment in 1947 of the Radio Eireann Symphony Orchestra - a full-time, professional body, large enough in size to tackle the bulk of the standard repertoire - was a red-letter day in Ireland's musical history. The official golden jubilee concert, a starry, gala event, takes place tomorrow night.
The vision that lay behind the founding of the symphony orchestra (and its smaller sibling, the Light Orchestra) was far-sighted. The new orchestra opened up access for listeners to the master works of European musical heritage. Its very existence gave emerging players a pensionable career at home to aspire to. It provided a pool of expert practitioners to train the younger generation. And it afforded composers a public platform, and a standard of performance, that would spur them as never before.
Already in the 1950s, the American Decca label issued Irish orchestral music on LP. In 1963 one of the greatest musical figures of the century, Stravinsky, visited Dublin to conduct his "Symphony of Psalms" at the Adelphi Cinema. From the late 1960s, the orchestra was central to the Festival of 20th-Century Music, introducing new sounds to Irish ears and stimulating a new generation of composers.
In the mid-1980s, the appointment of Bryden Thomson brought a fresh approach to programming and a solidity of interpretation that firmed and broadened the orchestra's following. And, most recently, the work of Irish composers has begun to appear on CD.
There have, however, been signs of myopia in the broadcasters' management of their orchestral resources. Protracted periods - including the crucial early years - were allowed to elapse without the appointment of a principal conductor. Relationships with the conductors who were appointed, the popular Thomson among them, often proved problematic.
RTE has had an effective monopoly over orchestral music in this State for half a century. The regular release of RTE orchestral players for freelance work has inhibited the development of an independent freelance market. At the same time, it has provided a necessary financial cushion in the continuance of salaries below the average industrial wage, for highly-trained musicians who have to provide their own expensive instruments. The monopoly extends beyond the concert hall to the opera house. RTE's generosity in facilitating operatic activity in Dublin and Wexford has actually served to stymie the growth of any external orchestral competition from this source. Scotland, which lagged behind Ireland in the creation of a full-time symphony orchestra, now boasts two orchestras of symphonic strength as well as an opera orchestra. It was not until the arrival at the Cabinet table of a Minister for Arts and Culture that RTE's management of the National Symphony Orchestra (as it became in 1990) was subjected to detailed political scrutiny. The PIANO report was a damning document and the winds of change now blowing through RTE are being clearly felt in the music department. The orchestra will need more than the well-earned goodwill surrounding its jubilee celebration as it leaves the relative certainty of its first half century and heads into exciting but uncharted waters.