Beethoven is in the Audience Tonight

School's out early today. It's five to three on a Wednesday afternoon in the National Concert Hall. The RTESO has just finished rehearsing Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring." As the wind and percussion players gather together their instruments and prepare to leave, the string players sit patiently waiting to finish the day's work. The last programme piece to be rehearsed, "Divertmento For Strings" by Irish composer Seoirse Bodley, is, as the title would suggest, for string only. By Paddy Agnew

Conductor Colman Pearce raises his hands. Nothing happens. The musiicians look at their music stands in some confusion - they have been given the wrong music. Ah well, that's it then. Colman Pearce reluctantly gestures to everyone that, without the music, the rehearsal is over and his gesture is greeted with a buzz of noise and a cry of "whoopee." The tyrant teacher has had to let the pupils out early today, for rehearsals are not scheduled to finish until a quarter past three.

There is undoubtedly an element of time serving and clock watching in the attitude of a small percentage of the RTESO's musicians. Semi-permanent, pensionable jobs breed a civil-service like complacency. R TESO players tend to be long term employees. 50% of the present personnel have been with the orchestra for at least the fast 15 years. Theirs is a unique employyment in Ireland.

In a city like London, which has an estimated pool of 20,000 out-of-work "classical" musicians, competition for orchestra posts is intense. When, in the mid-seventies, the BBCSO adverrtised the position of principal clarinet, conductor Pierre Boulez was staggered to be presented with a final list of over 80 applicants. In contrast, when two of the RTESO's horn players recently became unavailable for long term work, it proved impossible to find even one Irish replacement. Two English players were found to fill the vacancies.

The RTESO in Dublin is very diffeerent from the BBCSO in London. The RTESO has no competitors in Ireland, since it is the only symphony orchesstra in the country. In London alone there are at least a dozen fully proofessional symphony, opera and chammber orchestras. A city like London has a long tradition of music making which means that live orchestral music would survive regardless of the commings and goings of any particular orrchestra. In Ireland, there has not been, for all the obvious historical reasons, any tradition of live symphonic music. Were the RTESO disbanded today, then 80% of the classical music played in Ireland would cease tomorrow.

Considering the peculiarities and uniqueness of their situation, the musiical standards of the RTESO might be expected to be very poor. In fact the orchestra maintains a high standard of musicianship. Eugene Istomin, the celebrated American pianist, was in Dublin last month to perform Beethhoven's Piano Concerto No.4 with the RTESO. Istomin has played with orchestras allover the world and has made recordings with the Philadelphia Orchestra. After his first rehearsal with the RTESO, he summed them up neatly:

"When you come to DUblin, you are not expecting to play with the Vienna Philharmonic, you don't exxpect the best orchestra in the world. But I was very happy with the way this orchestra played. They are more than just competent, I was very pleassed with their musicianship."

The RTESO comprises 72 staff musicians, to which figure can be added another 30 players who regularly augment the orrchestra when so required by larger scale works (these include several modern works and the compositions of such as Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler). The total running cost of this large band is approximately £1 million per annum.

For that £1 million the television licence payer has the possibility of hearing the orchestra perform two live concerts per week for 39 weeks of the year. In addition, the orchestra spends 8-9 weeks of every year playing opera in Dublin and in Wexford. The orchesstra is regularly heard on R TE radio programmes and they provide the "band" for prestige occasions like the Eurovision song contest.

There are two further areas where the influence of the RTESO is vital. It provides a corps of professional players who can step into and auggment amateur orchestras throughout the country. Finally, the orchestra has by its very existence attracted to Ireland musicians who would otherrwise not have come here. Many of these players have been influential teachers over the last twenty years. Janos Vanaceck, the violinist, and Victor Malirish, the horn player are but two examples of musicians who have taught a generation of Irish musicians, many of whom are now in the RTESO themselves. A tradiition has been started.

************************
" ...two, three, four, ONE, two, three, four, ONE" Colman Pearce, the orchestra's principal connductor, is counting out a pause for the strings. When his baton comes down on the final "one", the strings come in with a dramatic staccatto chord. Pearce is taking his "Rite of Spring" rehearsals in sections - strings on their own; woodwind, brass and perrcussion together.

The strings playing of the staccatto chord does not please him. He asks the first violins, the second violins, the violas, the cellos and finally the basses all to play the same chord, one after another, until he thinks he has found the weak link. Then he gets the strings to play the chord one more time, but in unison. He is still not happy with the final sound. He notices that the attention of two of the bass players seems to have strayed for a moment:

"Bist du fertig, -:- also, ruhig, ganz ruhig"

The little ploy of addressing the bass in his native German works well. Attention redirected to the business in hand, the offending bar is played a final, satisfactory time.

Watching an orchestra rehearse, it becomes clear that the conductor is not so much the leader, he or she is more the dictator. In the performance of any symphonic music, almost everything depends on the conductor. Under the direction of a less than innspired conductor even the Berlin Phillharmonic can sound mundane. The brilliant conductor knows what he wants and is often less than diploomatic when trying to get that result from an orchestra. Therein lies the central tension of the orchestral musician's life.

The majority of orchestral musiicians, and certainly all principal players, will by the time they arrive in an orchestra have spent a large part of their lives, studying and playing music. Most string players spend well over ten years, seriously studying their craft. Obviously, havving studied that long, they develop their own ideas as to how something should be played. But if the conductor has another concept of how to deal with it, then too bad. Aisling DruryyByrne, principal cello in the orchestra:

"As a player, you are always guilty, you are always wrong. It has to be done the way the conductor wants it."

The dictatorial aspect of the connductor's role tends to have two obbvious results - sparks regularily fly as conductor's will meets with player's will and somewhere amidst all the bickering, the concept of the joy of music is lost.

When Karlheinz Stockhausen, the highly original German composer, conducted the RTESO in January, there were some inevitable problems. Stockhausen has an intense, almost ferocious, commitment to his own music, his own way of seeing and hearing things. His intensity and insisstence on a very high level of perforrmance came across some resistance from players.

After Stockhausen had asked one string player to repeat a phrase several. times, he became so exasperated with her that he told her not to play that section at all, in the' performance. At another moment, Stockhausen became very dismissive of the questions of one player and told him to stop asking stupid questions. Stockhausen's attiitude came across to the players as arrogant. The players came across to him as a little unwilling to open themmselves up to the feeling, to the dissappearance of individuality which he was trying to achieve with the orchesstra.

Stockhausen came to grief both on the bad weather of January, which meant that many of the orchestra failed to make it for rehearsals, and on the rigidity which is an inevitable part of the orchestral system. In the end Stockhausen had to cancel his concert and play a tape of the piece, INOris, instead.

f the orchestra is going to be bossed around every day of its working life, then it is going to retaliate in some way. Working conditions have to be

very good. The National Concert Hall looks a nice enough place to the rest of us, but unless the humidity of the building is exactly at 60 and the temmperature at 20C, the orchestra will not rehearse. This is because of the damagging effect which variations in temperaature and humidity can have on instruuments. Already the National Concert Hall has cracked one oboe and taken the back off one fiddle.

To a very large extent, the business of playing classical music is about the interpretation of the smallest detail in the composition of the work. Nuances and subtleties, which almost completeely bypass the untutored ear, form the bricks and mortar of the orchestral musician's working day. It can be an ennervating business, from which light relief is more than welcome.

"I was in my twenties before I reallised that playing music could be fun. It was at a party and I started messing, playing traditional music on the fiddle."

Aisling Drury-Byrne expresses a basic problem for the classical musiician - the extent to which he or she must exercise a type of restraint, when playing. Light relief is a must and comes when the orchestra starts playing behind or ahead of the beat or playing completely the wrong music. Some years ago, Gilbert Berg, formerly principal bassoon with the orchestra used to have something of a party piece when he would play the most complex and virtuoso violin or flute solo on the less agile bassoon. Another Berg ploy would be to stand up, dramatically, at the very climax of an imposing piece like the Tannnhauer Overture, in the manner of a footballer who has just scored the winning goal. Meanwhile back in the brass section, motor cars, the cost of their insurance and mortgages come in for plenty of scrutiny. The serioussness and the drama of much of the music played has to be debunked now and again.

The orchestra takes itself very seriously. Many of the leading players do two hours practice every day in addition to their 33 hour week. All the cellos and many of the other string players receive lesssons once a month as a check on the standards of their play. The players recently formed their own Artistic Committee because they felt that they were not playing as well as they could and should be playing.

About a month ago, some of the symphony musicians were working at Windmill Studios, recording the string section for some film music. The Ammerican producer who was in charge of the session surprised some of the' musicians, after an unsatisfactory runnthrough, by addressing them thus:

"Listen here folks. Where I come from, a guy that plays a bum note on a Monday is a guy that's out of work on a Tuesday."

Not all of the RTESO musicians disapproved of the sentiment. The principal players certainly would like to see better all round standards. The real musicians care. -

***** PANEL *****************
No discussion of the RTESO could now be complete without some reference to their new home - the National Concert Hall. The move from the Frances Xavier Hall to the new National Concert Hall has been like a move from Tolka Park to Wembley Stadium. The plush surroundings and sophisticated atmosphere of the National Concert Hall have created an environment, conducive to good music making.

However all is not perfect with the £31/2 million concert hall. The building's acoustic has given the players many problems despite the best efforts of the recently deceased Danish acoustic expert Dr. Vilhelm Lassen Gordon. A general complaint is that the bass sounds' rev~rberation is too long and consequently too loud. In the higher register, fiddle and flute players complain of a very thin sound and of having difficulty in hearing the whole orchestra.

Both the orchestra and RTE's director of music, Dr. Gerard Victory, feel that the orchestra has been in the hall long enough to have modified its playing to the different demands of a different acoustic. Dr. Victory acknowledges that some attempts may be made to change the hall's acoustic both by the use of the black acoustic boards which line the hall's walls and by the more extreme remedy of lowering the ceiling's height.

In the meantime, when the orchestra is playing softly, the clarity and quality of sound is impressive. A recent example of this was the clarinet solo with which "Colummbia Falls" by Nicola Le Fanu began. Every detail of Brian O'Rourke's (Principal Clarinet) delicate and musicianly playing could be clearly heard. The sound of his nextsilent "pianissimo" opening was easily heard at the back of the hall.