Institutionalised philistinism

Last Saturday marked a cataclysmic plunge in the decline of Maltese cultural life, plagued as it is by a new breed of politicians whose attitude to all things cultural would make even Goliath blush. An orchestral concert was organised at the Catholic Institute in Floriana, not to mark some Catholic anniversary mind you, but as an alternative venue for our newly renamed Malta Philharmonic Orchestra to play in, simply because the usual venues have become far too expensive; or so I was informed.

I had never been to the Catholic Institute before and, after last Saturday’s experience, I do not think wild horses would drag me in there again. I mean no disrespect to the building and its auditorium which is good enough for meetings of the MUSEUM or putting up farces like Stilla Tal-Bigilla which is scheduled for next week, but it is categorically not a suitable place for an orchestra of the MPO’s calibre to play Schumann, Mozart and Schubert. I felt as if I had suddenly been exiled to some remote village in Kazakhstan in a dull, drab and featureless theatre built during the most repressive of Soviet regimes. It was too depressing for words.

This proves the point I have been making ever since the plan for the Piano open-air theatre was announced: namely that, one, we need another open-air venue like we need a hole in the head; two, that it is a total waste of €20 million of taxpayers’ money and, three, that the opera house site is the ideal one to house our homeless orchestra.

The orchestra has numerically and acoustically outgrown its old home, our beloved Manoel Theatre, and, ironically, in a country without divorce laws, it and the theatre have been divorced without the orchestra having an alternative venue. The orchestra has to now pay to play wherever and I was told that, unsurprisingly, the Catholic Institute is the cheapest option; so have the mighty fallen. Since then it has been one long and painful decline for both entities, the MPO and the Manoel Theatre too. The philistine management aided and abetted by a philistine government has made sure of that.

While the Manoel Theatre Orchestra was housed in the Manoel Theatre, the organising committee used to schedule a minimum of two orchestral concerts a month. These were, most of the time, sell-outs and, depending on the soloist, it was quite normal to have to add the maximum number of extra chairs allowed by the safety regulations. Last Saturday a smattering of people wandered into the Catholic Institute wondering where on earth they had come to! This is simply not on. I had a couple of young friends who had never been to an orchestral concert before and I was squirming with embarrassment.

Why the Prime Minister and the Cabinet cannot see the logic of scrapping the ridiculous open-air theatre plans and replacing them with a proper concert hall similar to the one Renzo Piano built in Parma is totally beyond me and cannot be explained; not in a month of Sundays! Dr Gonzi is beginning to remind me of Pharaoh in the book of Exodus. Not revising these plans smacks of absolute obduracy.

Let nobody be under any illusion that I am writing this article out of any personal interest. I have been deeply involved in the fortunes of our orchestra since I was in my teens and I care for it very deeply. I care even more deeply for orchestral music and wish for more and more people from all walks of life to love it too. I strongly believe that once Malta has the good fortune to have produced such a fine orchestra so amazingly disproportionate to Malta’s size, it is the solemn duty of the government that employs it to do everything possible to use it far more; to nurture it, to continue building it up, send it out into the playgrounds and the squares in the summer and propagate the public’s interest and understanding of orchestral music. Above all else the government is to give it a permanent home on the very site where the orchestra was conceived before this wonderful band of musicians, who have come such a long way since they were instituted in 1968, reverts to insignificant mediocrity. To do anything else would be sheer sacrilege.