MUSIC / Denmark wins again: As in football, so in radio orchestras. Michael White explains

THE DANISH National Radio Symphony Orchestra is a mouthful that tells you everything you might not want to know about an institution with a double life. The name says this is the national orchestra of Denmark as well as the house orchestra of a broadcasting company, a most unalluring image. The general manager, Per Erik Veng, says: 'People expect radio ensembles to be dull and serious and maybe not so good - which means bad box office, especially in America. When we tour the United States we drop the Radio from the title.'

English audiences, by contrast, get the whole truth when the DN(R)SO comes to the Proms on Friday. But then the Proms are a celebration of radio: an annual embrace for the BBC's own house orchestras, and much needed this year when they have once again been under internal attack as a luxury. The full symphonic complement of BBCSO, BBC Philharmonic, BBC Scottish, and BBC Welsh (quite apart from the lighter BBC Concert Orchestra) costs the corporation about pounds 13m a year. The money comes from Radio 3's budget of pounds 47m and buys what used to be so fundamental to BBC policy but is now identified as 'cultural patronage'.

There is soon to be a big review of how the broadcasting orchestras fit into the musical life of Britain, undertaken jointly by the BBC and the Arts Council. Nicholas Kenyon, new Controller of Radio 3, who is on the review panel, says it's time to 'take a strategic look at their double role of broadcasting and concert-giving', which could well mean a shift towards expecting them to earn their keep.

As things stand, they don't. Nor can they if their traditional commitment to new (and especially British) music is to be maintained. New British scores do not fill concert halls; and the BBC has to pick up the bill. Outside the euphoria of the Proms, its live, paying audience dropped to 20 per cent attendances for much of the last concert season. The emptiness is aggravated by the number of people who would have gone to its concerts but don't because they can listen on radio. Kenyon thinks radio access is not the issue but the combination of high-brow repertory - which is not going to change - and low profile, 'which we're going to have to raise'.

This process has already begun. The BBCSO and Philharmonic have both taken a deep plunge into the world of glossy promotional campaigns, zappy corporate identities and commercial recordings on commercial labels (as opposed to the old, poorly distributed discs that used to creep soberly out of BBC Enterprises). What's more, the BBCSO is about to appoint a general manager: a businessman-impresario as opposed to the bureaucratic pantomime horse of Senior Producer and Controller who currently make all the key decisions. Someone, in fact, like Per Erik Veng who took over the DNRSO four years ago when Danish Radio underwent a shake-up, and has been building its profile dynamically, if not downright aggressively, ever since.

Broadcasting in Denmark to a population of five million is a smaller undertaking than in Britain. There are just three public radio stations, and classical music shares one of them with MOR repertory. But the classical schedules, which run at evenings and weekends, now peak above 16 per cent of the entire country - which is the sort of coverage Radio 3's publicity department is apparently unable to calculate, still less match - and the spend on the DNRSO is comparably high: 100 million krona ( pounds 10m) from a total Danish Radio budget of 800 million krona.

As a 'national' orchestra, its non-broadcasting life is more precisely defined than any of the BBC equivalents, and more competitive. Based in Copenhagen, it considers itself temperamentally 'southern', with a German sound. But in terms of ambition it looks to Norway, where the Oslo Philharmonic under its conductor Maris Jansons ranks top of the Scandinavian orchestral league. Per Erik Veng studies Oslo like bookmakers study form, following its example of balancing high-prestige venues such as London and Vienna against high-paying ones such as Rome and Madrid. 'It's important to get the orchestra on the right platforms in the right cities,' he says, so he has engaged a British agency, Van Walsum, to represent the orchestra in territories outside Scandinavia and Central Europe.

The BBCSO has always been a bigger operation - and so, more recently, has been the BBCPhil - but in a comparably cosy world. With the possibility of rougher times ahead they may find useful precedents in Denmark for building a free-market profile - drawn according to the dictates of the BBC's new era with far sharper pencils, attitudes and teeth.

The DNRSO plays the Royal Albert Hall (071- 823 9998) on Friday.

(Photograph omitted)