Orchestra reshuffle a chance to signal makeover and new home

says Greg Barns

HOW does the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra lift its reach and recognition in the community it lives and works in?

The retirement of a longserving managing director and the appointment of a 61-yearold Norwegian as the new chief conductor from 2020 present an opportunity to recalibrate how this important cultural institution functions in an era when the age of the traditional concert hall experience and full-time orchestras are in decline.

The current managing director of the TSO Nicholas Heyward has been in the job for two decades.

It is fair to say that no person in the modern era should stay in such a job for that long for one very obvious reason.

Running creative institutions requires fresh injections of talent and blood regularly. The days when managers of any institution, let alone those in the cultural space, staying in their job for more than 10 years at most a fortunately long gone.

While Mr Heyward has, and not before time, recognised the need for the TSO to engage more with the community, the reality is that on his watch the TSO has been housed in a concert hall that is an appendage to a hotel, the Grand Chancellor in Davey St, and which has no signage telling the world that this is the home of the TSO.

It must be the most secluded orchestra home in the world!

The other fact is that Mr Heyward’s team still relies far too heavily on taxpayers to fund the orchestra.

So his departure is good news. But only if the board of the orchestra, not known for its bold decision making over the years, appoints a dynamic preferably young general manager who comes from somewhere with a profile like Tasmania and who has runs on the board in terms of really shaking up programming, repertoire and the way musicians are engaged.

It requires a person who is a risk-taker and who is backed by the board to revamp the institution.

The first issue confronting the new CEO is how to make sure the TSO is branded better across Tasmania.

In many other cities and regions across the world, orchestras have homes which are open to the public, where community groups can use facilities and where both online and physical presence is strong throughout the city or region.

The new CEO must push for a new concert hall at Macquarie Point or elsewhere. One that is larger than the current, built on the cheap and beholden to a hotel chain, establishment.

Of course the new facility should be, as noted above already happens elsewhere, a concert hall which has capacity for education programs, community outreach and decent bar and eating facilities.

Joachim Mischke, an arts writer from Hamburg Germany puts it is this way: “There is only one way to remain contemporary and relevant in the balancing act between entertainment and serious music: venues must transform themselves into spaces of possibility, away from traditional formats, away from rigid evening slots. For a musical snack a little concert would do as well. Away from stiff subscriptions structures,

which smack of compulsory attendance. Away from ‘chalk and talk’ instruction in emotion.

Away too from some cherished formulas for concert menus, particularly the now stale sandwich model with the indigestible avant-garde between more popular pieces of music. Instead: use what you have, do as much as you can with the site and the sitespecific options. New concepts and longer-term, tailor-made artist residencies.”

None of this can be achieved in the current TSO home.

The new CEO has also to look at expanding the TSO’s repertoire by giving it the capacity to pay larger works. The TSO’s small numbers — it is essentially what we call a chamber orchestra — mean that it cannot regularly program works that require a bigger ensemble.

This means much of the 20th century repertoire, particularly exciting American composers, and more traditional big features like Mahler and Shostakovich symphonies, are only rarely heard. Of course augmenting a musical ensemble with more players costs money but smart negotiations and sidelining self serving industrial bargaining could mean more musicians playing with the TSO.

And the expansion of repertoire of the orchestra depends on its new chief conductor, Eivind Aadland. The newly appointed boss of the TSO might be an inspiring choice if he engages with the community more than his predecessors have done and moves the orchestra away from its fairly predictable programming.

While not everyone can be Leonard Bernstein, Daniel Barenboim or Herbert Von Karajan, the three great conductors who had, and in the case of Barenboim still has, influential profiles, but it is important that the chief conductor of the leading orchestra in a community is a person who is accessible to all of us and who is prepared to engage publicly.

The TSO is part of the cultural furniture in this community but it needs to be much more dynamic and open, in the same way that Mona is, for example.

A new CEO and a new chief conductor allow for a new beginning for an old model. Let’s hope this happens.