{TABLE} Unfinished Symphony ............ Schubert Trumpet Concerto ............... Haydn Symphony No 40 ................. Mozart {/TABLE} THE drawbacks of concerts in theatres will be well remembered by music lovers who attended symphony concerts at Dublin's Gaiety Theatre and St Francis Xavier Hall.
The memories are not fond ones. The acoustics were horribly dry. Sound floated out into the wings and up into the flies so that the listener could imagine the orchestra being the other side of a curtain of sound inhibiting gauze. The conventional distribution of players on the stage favoured string at the expense of wind and some of the best results; heard at the SFX were the out come of Proinnsias O Duinn bringing the woodwind out to the front, on the opposite side to the violins.
Hearing the RTE Concert Orchestra under O Duinn in their first concert at Galway's new Town Hall Theatre on Wednesday night, I couldn't help wondering about the benefits that might accrue from his re adopting his unorthodox layout in this new venue, where there is no indication that any account has been taken of the needs of non amplified music.
The curtained effect is strongly felt, especially downstairs where, in Haydn's Trumpet Concerto, there was the added disorientation of feeling the soloist and orchestra to be playing as in two different acoustics. The soloist here was Mark O'Keeffe, in better form than I have ever heard him before, sure and shapely in delivery, appealingly creamy in tone, and with a sensitive delicacy that I hadn't encountered from him as a soloist in the past.
The Haydn benefitted, too, from the sharpest orchestral responses of the evening.
Schubert's Unfinished Symphony was often oddly understated (in spite of the closeness of the players in the small theatre) bringing moments of interestingly chamber music like character but, more often than not, managing to sound remote disengaged.
The sound from the balcony from where I listened to Mozart's G minor Symphony was better, rather more spacious and better integrated, but there remained a flattened out quality to the phrasing which allowed this great work to sound uncommonly pedestrian. I'm sure that trial and error, and an open attitude to experimentation, will bring a change from the all black, heavily curtained stage which was used last night. Sound reflecting surfaces around and possibly above the musicians are badly needed to ensure that the bloom and lustre of orchestral tone are not lost in a venue that obviously has the potential to bring a new lease of life to Galway in areas of the repertoire that are open to orchestras up to around the size of RTECO.
