A Different View with Dave O’Connell

At first glance, it should be like trying to mix oil and water – an evening with the RTÉ Concert Orchestra interspersed with chat, ostensibly with sports stars but in reality just with well-known and familiar faces who happened to have excelled in their chosen sport.

But when the conduit – or conductor, if you like – of this experiment is the irrepressible Marty Morrissey, the odds suddenly switch into a more favourable direction.

Last Friday night in Leisureland, Marty was in his element, taking the audience – and perhaps the orchestra too – into places neither of them were entirely familiar with, but which ultimately proved well worth the ride.

The actual conductor who ensured a smooth evening was Gavin Maloney – or to give him his full title, the Associate Principal Conductor of the RTÉ Concert Orchestra – and he looked like a man who was enjoying a very different night at the proverbial office.

Not entirely unique of course, because the Orchestra has long embraced these more populist evenings – performing film scores, movie themes or songs from the musicals as they broaden their base beyond what might be considered their traditional fare.

But even for them, you’d imagine that a night playing the themes from the Sunday Game and Match of the Day, Chariots of Fire and Raging Bull, mixed with their stirring accompaniment to the Fields of Athenry and the West Awake might constitute a departure from their usual beat.

Equally it could well have been that those who came primarily to enjoy the Orchestra might find that chats with sporting legends wasn’t what they signed up for – but when Marty is on the mic, it doesn’t have to follow down a predictable road.

Take Friday night when his guests included Johnny Glynn, the man who got the winning goal for Galway United in the 1991 FAI Cup Final; Joe Connolly, captain of the All-Ireland-winning Galway hurlers in 1980; Olympic medallist Rob Heffernan, and Ros na Rún star Macdara Ó Fátharta.

In each case, they were led, willingly, away from that predicable path.