ALBERT ROSEN first came to our view as yet another discovery by Dr Tom Walsh's Wexford Opera Festival, which launched stars such as Geraint Evans, Graziella Sciutti and Lesley Garrett. Albert was then responsible for a marvellous performance of Massenet's Don Quichotte on his first appearance.
It was to all our great joy, in the chaotic days following Tibor Paul's departure, that RTE's head of music, Gerard Victory, appointed Albert as principal conductor of the RTE Symphony Orchestra (as the NSO was then known).
Our orchestra (and we) needed a conductor who would train this band of fine musicians and make it into a good, coherent body which would sound with one unified disciplined, warmhearted voice, with its own collective personality, in any sort of music under any sort of visiting conductor. That was what Albert did.
At its beginning Jean Martinon made it a good orchestra. Tibor Paul made it an orchestra that our often philistine leaders recognised as a national asset that could not be ignored - and gave it a pride in its own self. Albert gave it and its individual members a warm hearted personality which it never lost, in spite of official neglect and seemingly nonexistent direction.
Though born and bred in Vienna, with one parent Austrian, Albert was a Czech in his heart, through and through. During Dubcek's sadly shortlived "Prague Spring" in 1968 (before Russian tanks rolled in), he arranged a trip for me to the Prague Spring Festival.
He took us to an unforgettable performance of Gluck's Orfeo in the Tylovo Theatre (where Don Giovanni was first performed). We went to the house where Mozart had lived, now a Mozart Museum, among whose exhibits is a brilliantly blond lock of his hair.
Albert was not a political animal, but he was very conscious of the amount of money that the State poured into the arts. Marx wrote that religion was the opiate of the people and that communism had substituted for the arts. And it was in the interval of a concert by the Smetana and Janacek Quartets that he made a memorable remark about the communist system and the arts: "If a thing is organisated, it is organisated well. If it is not organisated, it does not exist."
When Toni Walsh brought him here, he was one of a dozen or so permanent conductors of the National Opera in Prague. His one complaint was that opera productions were over rehearsed until they nearly got stale; whereas the then DGOS performances were barely rehearsed and even Wexford could not afford the rehearsals Dr Walsh would have liked.
Albert was always a modest man, especially for a conductor. At first, RTE fixed him up in the Gresham. This was too ostentatious and he moved to a modest hotel on the south side of Denmark Street and then to digs in Upper Gardiner Street.
Orchestral musicians are apt to think of themselves as hard chaws. In fact they are not, but are artists and idealists awaiting real leadership. Albert gave that to our NSO.
One of its members has described him as being "fantastic, the only one I have played under who engendered real excitement. Some of the new young English players did not like him, but ... he lumbered on to the platform like a great bear, seemed to us a great showman and always liked to give the overall picture" of the music.
Bill Drakeford on Anna Livia Radio has said that "he never gave a dull performance". How true!
For me, he was not a showman, but just a very fine conductor who wanted to project the music, always the music, to us in the audience, and whose performances were always warmhearted, as was his own personality.