Arts and Culture

Against the backdrop of disruption to the planning and delivery of arts and cultural activity throughout the country arising from the far-reaching public health restrictions reintroduced in early 2021, RTÉ continued to provide its audiences with access to some outstanding high-quality arts and culture programming across its platforms and channels. These included key RTÉ arts documentaries on television, a remarkable range of streamed and broadcast orchestral performances despite the absence of live audiences and a full schedule of regular RTÉ radio and online content. At times this broadcast content offered a welcome distraction or even an escape from all things pandemic while at other times it reflected how this societal upheaval had affected both the working lives of artists and public interaction with and access to culture.

Television

Television highlights included two significant documentary profiles of major Irish artists past and present: Jack B. Yeats: The Man Who Painted Ireland and Colm Tóibín: On Memory’s Shore. This focus on showcasing diverse contemporary artists also included a ten-part series of The Works Presents in autumn, including features on writers, Doireann Ní Ghríofa and Louise O’Neill, filmmaker, Jim Sheridan, opera star, Tara Erraught, musicians, Martin Hayes and Radie Peat and choreographer, Michael Keegan-Dolan. Earlier in the summer, a major three-part series Soundtrack to My Life featured interviews and performances alongside the RTÉ Concert Orchestra by singers Johnny Logan, James Vincent McMorrow and Celine Byrne. The winter schedule featured a two-part series tracing the phenomenal recent trajectory of Irish dance, Steps of Freedom: The Story of Irish Dance together with two documentaries which looked at recent history in rather different ways –one a documentary on the burgeoning Irish folk scene of the 1970s, The Flourishing, and the other reflecting the social history of Dublin’s evolving suburbia in the 1950s as archived by amateur filmmaker Lesley Crowe, in Camera, Tripod, Bicycle.

Radio

RTÉ Radio 1 extended its successful Bank Holiday Monday series The RTÉ Concert Orchestra Presents with studio broadcasts featuring David Kitt, Niamh Regan, Mick Flannery and Susan O’Neill and a focus on the work of poet, Emily Dickinson. Other highlights included the fourth annual RTÉ Radio 1 Folk Awards which, happily, returned to Vicar Street in November as one of the first live events of the year, while broadcasting live on RTÉ Radio 1 and with television highlights the following weekend.

RTÉ Radio 1 also continued to offer a wide range of regular arts and culture programming, despite the impact of constraints on public gatherings. Arena continued to bring the arts and culture stories from behind the headlines. Ceilí House continued to broadcast great music despite being unable to immerse itself within local communities for its trademark live experiences. The Rolling Wave also shone a spotlight on how traditional musicians continued to perform and create, including a second series of Faoiseamh, featuring ten new pieces commissioned together with the Irish Traditional Music Archive from a range of musicians, including Fintan Vallely, Máire Breathnach and Úna Ní Fhlannagáin. RTÉ’s commitment to commissioning artists extended to a second series of 12 new half-hour short stories, in conjunction with the Decade of Centenaries, Spoken Stories: Independence from some of the most highly regarded writers in the form today. Contributors, including Anne Enright, Kevin Barry, Eoghan Mac Giolla Bhríde, Yan Ge, Mary Costello, Sue Rainsford, Colin Barrett and Neil Jordan, were invited to consider through a story what independence could mean today, 100 years after Ireland’s War of Independence. Likewise, Sunday Miscellany continued to feature original writing from a wide range of contributors throughout the year. This depth of interest in original writing in Ireland was also evident in the number of applications and the calibre of writing in the RTÉ Short Story Competition, won this year by Kevin Donnellan, with the ten shortlisted stories being recorded and broadcast on RTÉ Radio 1’s Late Date.

This focus on commissioning original work extended to RTÉ lyric fm where The Lyric Feature broadcast a series of new music, arts and culture documentaries including commissioned work from Irish composers, musicians, and writers, together with 14 more hours of documentaries from the independent sector in partnership with the BAI and the IRP. The programme also won two silvers and one bronze at the 2021 New York Festivals Radio Awards.

In parallel, RTÉ lyric fm continued to offer a full range of daytime programming from Marty in the Morning to Classic Drive while The Full Score and The Lyric Concert featured a combination of recorded and live-streamed cross-platform collaborations, including 20 RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra concerts produced and broadcast live by RTÉ lyric fm, carried online and streamed by RTÉ Culture, RTÉ One television and ARTE. In Opera Night with Paul Herriott, this focus on collaboration extended to broadcasting live from the Wexford Festival Opera with three operas, including Edmea by Catalani, carried on RTÉ lyric fm, online via RTÉ Culture and live throughout the EBU reaching 10 million radio listeners.

Orchestras

Despite the very real constraints, the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra continued to present live Friday evening concerts from the National Concert Hall, broadcast via RTÉ lyric fm and live-streamed on rte.ie/culture. From these recordings, two series of ten filmed concert performances were subsequently broadcast on RTÉ One television in spring and autumn.

The RTÉ Concert Orchestra featured in a number of RTÉ One television specials including Starman: The RTÉ Concert Orchestra Performs the Songs of David Bowie, a spectacular tribute featuring guest artists including Rufus Wainwright, Joe Elliott, Suzanne Vega, Sharon Corr, Imelda May and Christy Dignam. In addition, the Concert Orchestra performed in a typically diverse range of settings from working virtually with Emma Langford and Dana Masters for International Women’s Day on RTÉ Radio 1 to a series of Christmas recorded broadcasts for RTÉ lyric fm, including Handel’s Messiah from St. Patrick’s Cathedral and Christmas Swing featuring The Nutcracker by Tchaikovsky, arranged by Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn; and a live concert with Mick Flannery and Susan O’Neill which was broadcast on RTÉ Radio 1 and subsequently televised on RTÉ One.

Special Events

For Culture Night 2021, mindful of the constraints on live public assembly, RTÉ commissioned a special opening sequence to The Late Late Show, featuring a night-time journey around cultural centres in Dublin, Cork and Sligo exploring these spaces and the art and artefacts within, against the backdrop of night, darkness and empty rooms. All of this was animated by diverse performers and an original commissioned music score to create a unique experience. This was complemented by a Nationwide Culture Night Special on RTÉ One featuring events in preparation in Tullamore, Tralee, Ballymore Eustace, Mountmellick and Finglas. Additionally, for Culture Night, the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, with comedian Tommy Tiernan narrating, recreated Prokofiev’s lovable Peter and the Wolf, which was broadcast and live-streamed on RTÉ Lyric fm’s The Lyric Concert.