After their rift, maybe it’s time RTÉ and Kees Bakels made up

Dutch conductor Kees Bakels made his debut with the National Youth Orchestra of Ireland last weekend. Bakels first appeared in Ireland, with the Ulster Orchestra in Belfast, in the late 1980s. Engagements with the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra followed in the early 1990s.

Critical responses from both sides of the Border were positive. Irish Times critics described him as "gifted" and said his work with the NSO produced "an outstanding experience". Small wonder, then, that at a time when the NSO's principal conductor, George Hurst, had resigned because of the way RTÉ was treating its players, Bakels seemed like the man to get the orchestra back on course again.

His appointment as principal conductor of the NSO was announced in July 1992. His remit was to embrace more than just his own concerts. He was to be involved “in all programming and artistic decisions,” and his appointment was also tied in to a re-auditioning process for players.

RTÉ and its musicians had been through considerable turmoil, and the then head of music, Cathal MacCabe, spoke of the appointment in a tone of relief. “Relationships between myself and my colleagues in the orchestras have not always been most equable over the years,” he said. “It is therefore marvellous that the person they wanted was the person that I wanted, and that he was prepared to take the orchestra and me on.”

But things just didn’t work out. With just days to spare, Bakels’s withdrew from his first concert in his new role for what were described as “contractual difficulties”.

Some of them, it turned out, concerned RTÉ’s failure to deliver on the conductor’s wish to see a number of changes in personnel implemented before his first concerts and the associated recordings of Nielsen symphonies for the Naxos label.

Strange as it may seem, RTÉ had announced the appointment without having a signed contract. When the undertakings that had been promised were not delivered, Bakels was free to walk away and become the principal conductor who never was.

So complete was the rift that opened up, that Bakels has had to wait more than two decades before conducting in Dublin again, although his return was not with the NSO but with the National Youth Orchestra of Ireland. He seems to have had plenty to occupy himself in between, not least when he became the first music director of the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra in Kuala Lumpur, where he served from 1997 until 2005.

At the National Concert Hall on Sunday afternoon, he led the players of the NYOI through a very varied programme of Debussy, Elgar and Tchaikovsky with real stylistic flair.

The surges and billows of Debussy's La Mer were captured with colouristic aplomb and the playing of this highly suggestive score was notable for the consistent effectiveness of the dynamic shading.

The orchestra offered sensitive support to the refreshingly plain-spoken playing of Martin Johnson in Elgar's Cello Concerto. And in an extended selection from Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty ballet, the young musicians showed the kind of winning way with long-breathed melodic lines that is essential to make this music sound its best.

Not many conductors who have worked with the NYOI have managed to transport the orchestra so thoroughly into three such distinctively different musical worlds. Maybe it’s time for RTÉ and Bakels to kiss and make up, and remind us of what we could have had two decades ago had the plans of the 1990s not unravelled so disastrously.

Pricing problems

Ten years before Kees Bakels set foot in the National Concert Hall, RTÉ was living through another crisis, one brought about directly by the opening of the hall itself.

Before the NCH opened, in September 1981, the orchestral musical season was quite different to now. The RTÉ Symphony Orchestra (as it was then known) behaved like a broadcasting orchestra, with many of its concerts treated as studio events. They were free to the public, and, without the constraints of box office, free to explore the backroads of the repertoire as well as contemporary music from at home and abroad.

The move to the NCH brought all of that to an end. In quick order, the free concerts were abandoned (hall hire was now costing RTÉ more) and issues with the new box office structure (RTÉ had to hand over its ticket handling to the NCH) meant that the new prices were different.

I’ve got some old brochures from the 1970s, which show ticket prices in 1971 ranging from 40p to £1.40 and from 1979 showing £1 to £3.25. In January 1982, this had become £4 to £7. What’s interesting is not the increase – those were inflationary times – but the narrowing of the price range. In 1971 the multiple between the top and bottom was 3.5 and in 1979 it was 3.25. But when the NCH opened it dropped to 1.75.

The only way I can see that kind of drop is as a measure that’s bound to create effects of social exclusion. The lowest ticket prices went up by a factor of four, the highest by a factor of just 2.15. If that’s not an example of the least well-off being asked to subsidise the most well-off, I don’t know what is. Things have improved over the years, but the last couple of seasons have seen RTÉ up to its old tricks again.

In September 2008, the month of Ireland’s awe-inspiring bank guarantee, the NSO’s ticket prices ranged from €10 to €35, and they were kept that way until last year, when all prices but the highest were raised.

In September 2014, €2 was added to all of the lower prices, and they’ve been raised again, by up to €3.50 from next September. The lowest now stands a full 50 per cent higher than it did in 2008 and the second lowest is 31 per cent higher. But the top price remains unchanged. The multiplier has dropped below three.

Even in Tory-governed London the multiplier for orchestras is regularly around four. And London venues less than half the size of the NCH can manage a multiplier in the same range as the NSO. It is surely time for some fresh thinking.

• mdervan@irishtimes.com