The future of the ONS is now secure, but why not external expertise?

The government talked about the future of the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra. Last week, the Cabinet "authorized the opening of discussions on the implementation of the recommendations of the report on RTÉ Orchestras Securing a Sustainable Future by Helen Boaden and Mediatics". And the Government "agreed in principle that the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra should be under the jurisdiction of the National Concert Hall and should not be established as a separate state body" .

The decision must be welcomed. It secures a future at the NSO and will reverse the situation that has left the orchestra with a core of permanent players that has shrunk to a level never seen since the 1950s.

However, the l & # 39; exact future is anything but clear. The ONS is without a senior leader and has recently lost its leader, Helena Wood. Will RTÉ, the organization that kills the orchestra, now be allowed to fill these key positions?

And what is the "RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra" that represents the government's decision? Is it just the players? Or does it also include the direction of RTÉ that has so poorly served the orchestra, as documented in the journal Boaden?

Initial discussions on the implementation of the report will be conducted under a monitoring group of ministries of culture and communications and a working group involving RTÉ and NCH. Unfortunately, the announcement last week makes no mention of outside expertise

What the announcement will certainly do, it is copperfasten 2018 as a year of great changes in the world of music and opera in Ireland. In addition to the changes involving the RTÉ orchestras, there has been announcement of the renovation and development of the NCH Earlsfort Terrace site. The decision of where the NSO will hold its concerts while construction work is underway will obviously be key to the short-term viability of the orchestra.

Eugene Downes' musical reign at the Kilkenny Arts Festival concludes this year. his successor was announced as Olga Barry, who is a festival producer in Kilkenny and whose resume includes passages to the Crash Ensemble and the RTÉ Concert Orchestra.

Wexford Festival Opera is looking for an artistic director to succeed David Agler Since 2005, the Irish National Opera has emerged through the merger of the Opera Theater Company and Wide Open Opera at the beginning of the year. The changes at the top of music and opera will go far

Calm at Cork

The West Cork Chamber Music Festival is a haven of stability in comparison. Festival director Francis Humphrys has been on site since 1996 and has created other festivals for the city of Bantry, the West Cork Literary Festival, which opens Friday; and Masters of Tradition, which begins Wednesday, August 22

Humphrys this year proposed a strand of female music, dating back to Hildegarde of Bingen, and arriving until now in the new Deirdre Gribbin Kindersang a co-commission with the Wigmore Hall and Goethe-Institute, with contributions from PRS Open Call.

The play, for soprano (Caroline Melzer) and violin (Nurit Stark), features poems by Lotte Kramer that reflects her experience as a child rescued from Nazi Germany and brought to England . The backgrounds of Gribbins are both meditative and dramatic, the companion violin and voice commentator, and often a magnifying glass of the emotional thrust of words, as in his slides causing vertigo in The Red Cross Telegram .

In Deportation The voice elevates and plunges into a nightmarish terror, recalling and scrutinizing the darkest corners and shadows of the past. A more striking performance than Melzer and Stark's in this piece, which is clearly intended to go from heart to heart, would be hard to imagine.

There was also the first Irish of the most recent chamber work of the octogenarian Sofia Gubaidulina. His So se e e s (1945-19004) of 2013 is a memorial to his friend and fellow composer Viktor Suslin (1942-2012) – with Vyacheslav Artyomov they founded the ensemble of Astraea improvisation in the Soviet Union in 1975.

So sees for violin (Stark), double bass (Niek de Groot), piano (Cédric Pescia) and percussion (Luigi Gaggero) is for the essential spared, sorry, spaced, the material sometimes moving between the instruments as if one was only the resonance or the echo of the other. What was particularly memorable in this melancholy, sometimes very hectic music, was the way Stark managed to produce a supercharged sound even when the sound it produced was the most ethereal.

Sense of focus

Lesser known female composers of the 19th and early 20th centuries also figured. If I had to choose between the piano Sextet and the wind of Louise Farrenc (1804-75) and the Trio for piano of Rebecca Clarke (1886-1979), I would opt for the substance of the Clarke compared to the color well designed of the Farrenc. The Clarke performers (Andreas Reiner, violin, Ella van Poucke, cello, and Nathalia Milstein, piano) also paid more attention to their play.

Highlights of the festival include the exciting wealth and passionate mezzo-soprano Lyudmila Shkirtil with pianist Yuri Serov in Petersburg a remarkable cycle of Blok songs by a rarely heard Russian composer. Georgy Sviridov (1915-98), a mesmerizing tale of Philippe Cassard's first book by Debussy Preludes, and an incisive communication of György Kurtág's miniatures Scenes from a novel (Melzer, Stark, de Groot , Gaggero).

Alina Ibragimova studied Brahms' violin sonatas with pianist Cédric Tiberghien (they were particularly good in the first two) and the miraculously delicate direction of a performance by Schoenberg Verklärte Nacht was really magical. Irish violinist Mairéad Hickey has also distinguished himself in intriguing and discreet interpretations of Schubert's Piano Trio twice (with Christopher Marwood, cello and Barry Douglas, piano), and Brahms's Sextet in G (Andreas Reiner, Dana Zemtsov, Andreas, Dana Zemtsov Brantelid and Ella van Poucke).