Miracles and Triumphs

Johannes Fritzsch
Conductor

Johannes Fritzsch was appointed Principal Conductor and Artistic Adviser of the Queensland Symphony Orchestra in February, 2021 having previously served as their Chief Conductor (2008-2014). Since 2018, Johannes has held the position of Principal Guest Conductor of the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra.

From 2006 – 2013 he was Chief Conductor and Artistic Director of the Oper Graz, Grazer Philharmonisches Orchester (Austria). Prior to his appointment in Graz, Johannes held the position of Chief Conductor and Artistic Director of the Staatsoper Nürnberg. He regularly conducts the major Australasian orchestras as well as leading productions for Opera Australia, Opera Queensland, West Australian Opera and State Opera of South Australia.

In January 2015, Johannes was appointed Adjunct Professor, The Conservatorium of Music, School of Creative Arts and Media at the University of Tasmania; in June 2019, he joined the Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith University as Professor of Opera and Orchestral Studies. In 2017, the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra invited him to design and lead the newly founded Australian Conducting Academy. In 2021, he conducts the Auckland Philharmonia and the Sydney, Melbourne, Queensland, Tasmanian and West Australian Symphony Orchestras.

© Patrick Togher Artists’ Management 2021

WASO Principal Conductor Asher Fisch is unable to perform this concert as originally scheduled due to travel restrictions resulting from COVID-19. We are grateful to Johannes Fritzsch for joining us tonight.

Photo credit: Peter Wallis

David Evans
Horn

David Evans studied horn at the University of Melbourne and the Victorian College of the Arts, gaining his Bachelor of Music in 1999 before completing three programs at the Australian National Academy of Music. In 2002 David was appointed Principal Horn with the West Australian Symphony Orchestra, and has since appeared as a soloist with WASO on numerous occasions, performing works by Schumann, Mozart and Britten.

David has performed as Guest Principal Horn in the Sydney, Melbourne, Tasmanian and New Zealand Symphony Orchestras, and in July 2010 David performed a recital as a featured artist at the 42nd International Horn Symposium in Brisbane. David was a member of the Australian World Orchestra in 2013, and was made an Honorary Fellow of the Faculty of the Victorian College of the Arts and Melbourne Conservatorium of Music in September 2013.

Julia Brooke
Horn

Julia Brooke completed a Bachelor of Music at the Sydney Conservatorium under the guidance of Saul Lewis and Andrew Bain, before moving to Melbourne in 2010 to continue studies at the Australian National Academy of Music. Julia completed a study tour of Britain and Germany in 2009, receiving lessons from teachers including Marie-Luise Neunecker, Michael Thompson and Ab Koster. During her studies she participated in two international tours with the Australian Youth Orchestra, which included performances at the BBC Proms at Royal Albert Hall and the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam.

She has performed with all of the State orchestras around Australia, as well as the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, and played horn and Wagner tuba in Wagner’s Ring Cycle in Melbourne in 2013. Julia joined WASO in 2014. In 2018 she was the recipient of the WASO Patrons and Friends Scholarship, allowing her to travel to the USA. There she received lessons from leading female horn players from The Philadelphia Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic, amongst others.

Robert Gladstones
Horn

Rob studied horn at the Canberra School of Music with Hector MacDonald, graduating in 1985. During his student years he was a member of the West Australian Youth Orchestra, the Canberra Youth Orchestra and the Australian Youth Orchestra.

Rob took up the position of 2nd Horn in the Sydney Elizabethan Orchestra (now the Opera Australia Orchestra) in 1986 and was appointed Associate Principal in 1988. During his time in Sydney, Rob played with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and Australian Chamber Orchestra. Rob moved back to Perth in 1989 to take up the position of Associate Principal Horn with the West Australian Symphony Orchestra, and was appointed Principal 3rd Horn in 1995.

Rob is a regular performer and soloist with many local ensembles including the Fremantle Chamber Orchestra, UWA Choral Society, South Side Symphony Orchestra and the W.A. Mozarteum.

Rob is Artistic Advisor for the Perth Horn Society and Musical Director for the Southside Symphony Orchestra and the Combined Districts Concert Band.

Francesco Lo Surdo
Horn

Francesco “Frankie” Lo Surdo studied at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music under Ben Jacks. In 2009 he spent a year on contract with the Queensland Symphony Orchestra, before returning to Sydney to complete his degree.

Frankie has worked as a freelance orchestral and recording musician, and was a member of the Sydney Sinfonia and the Australian Youth Orchestra, the latter as Principal Horn in 2009.

Frankie has appeared with the Australian Chamber Orchestra, Sydney Symphony, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Queensland Symphony Orchestra, Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, Australian Opera and Ballet Orchestra, Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra, and the West Australian Symphony Orchestra (of which he has been a full time tutti member since 2011). As a chamber musician, he has performed with the Sydney Omega Ensemble, Sydney Brass, and the Australia Ensemble. Frankie is the current horn lecturer at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts and has been guest lecturer at the University of Western Australia, Queensland Conservatorium, and the Australian National Academy of Music.

Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)

Symphony No.96 Miracle

Adagio – Allegro
Andante
Menuetto (Allegretto)
Finale (Vivace assai)

Barely had the 58-year-old Haydn arrived in London early in 1791 than he was hard at work composing music for his first season with the impresario Johann Peter Salomon. There were to be a pair of symphonies (Nos 96 and 95) and an opera, as well as numerous smaller works. As a standby, Haydn was also carrying symphonies Nos 90 and 92, which would be new to London.

While he was acclimatising to the bustle of this city of 900,000 inhabitants and the incessant cries of street vendors’ intruding on his concentration, Haydn was swept up in a whirl of diplomatic, social and media commitments. Plans were proceeding to launch Salomon’s subscription series in less than six weeks. Even Haydn could hardly have guaranteed his new Symphony No.96 in such circumstances. Two delays put off the opening until Friday 11 March, by which time Symphony No.96 was probably well and truly ready. But circumstantial evidence now suggests that the first symphony Haydn performed in London was No.92 (later to be called the Oxford).

No.96, as the first symphony Haydn wrote in London, was probably the new work premiered in the concert of 29 April 1791. Since the sixties we’ve been able to hear it restored from the emasculations of 19th-century editors, who drastically simplified, or even omitted, its powerful writing for trumpets and drums (the latter deliberately positioned by Haydn for maximum effect on a raised central platform behind the rest of the orchestra).

Harmonically, Haydn begins with a wide range of wares, clouding the slow but sunny introduction with minor tonalities after only seven bars, tossing the apparently light-hearted Allegro subject turbulently through several minor keys in the development, suspending us on a dramatic precipice for almost three bars of silence before descending into the remotest possible key, and even allowing a brief fortissimo intrusion of D minor as we are on course for a major-key homecoming. In this first movement, Haydn so varies his treatment of the single Allegro theme that he is able to dispense with the usual contrasting second subject.

Two solo violins (one of them Salomen, who was concertmaster as well as impresario) take centre stage in the slow movement, weaving a delicate tracery around the melody in the style of a concerto-grosso concertino.

If Haydn seeks to appeal to English taste in the slow movement, his minuet is thoroughly Austrian, with an attractive oboe solo in the trio section which is accompanied in strict waltz rhythm.

The Finale is a brilliant and technically demanding sonata-rondo movement in the style of a perpetuum mobile in which Haydn sought ‘the softest piano and a very quick tempo.’

Heard with the pyramidal orchestral layout Haydn employed to project his brass and timpani, and with his highly accomplished 40-piece band in the 800- seat Hanover Square Room, there is little doubt that the impact of this first Haydn symphony composed in London would have made it a worthy salute from the world’s most acclaimed composer to the world’s greatest metropolis.

Anthony Cane © 2002-2007

First performance:
29 April 1791, London.

Most recent WASO performance:
20-21 June 1992. David Porcelijn, conductor.

Instrumentation:
two each of flutes, oboes and bassoons; two horns, two trumpets; timpani and strings.

Robert Schumann (1810-1856)

Konzertstück (Concert Piece) in F for four horns and orchestra, Op.86

Lebhaft
Romanze (ziemlich langsam,
doch nicht schleppend) –
Sehr lebhaft

Orchestral horn players form a guild united by the tightrope-walking perils associated with their craft. Reputed the trickiest instrument to play, the French horn can also be one of the most exciting and evocative. These qualities come multiplied by four in a work exposing the four players of a standard section as soloists. Until recently, Schumann’s Konzertstück was known more by reputation and from recordings than in concert; nowadays, horn sections over the world are queuing up begging their orchestra’s program planners to let them have a go. This is a sign of the general rise of skill and confidence in the guild, but it is also part of a revaluation of Schumann’s orchestral music. He himself, revealing that he had ‘written the piece with great passion’, thought it ‘one of my best things’. The passion must have come from knowing that it could be performed – it was – but after that first performance at the Leipzig Gewandhaus in February 1850 the piece languished, deemed unperformable for its sheer difficulties, and remained for long, rather than a repertoire piece, a historical landmark: the first important concerto-like work intended, from the first, for valved horn.

That Schumann emerges as a pioneer of the use of the valved horn, in his symphonies, and especially his solo pieces for the instrument, has to do with his exposure to skilled players. One in particular, Joseph Rudolf Levy (or Lewy), was the leader of the horns in the Dresden Court Orchestra, and it was in Dresden, in 1849, that Schumann composed his Adagio and Allegro Op.70, for horn and piano. He was so excited by it that the very next day he began composing a ‘four horn work’, as he called it. Two days later he finished the sketch; a few weeks more and the orchestration was complete. On 15 October 1849 Schumann attended a rehearsal of his new work at Levy’s home. It was not Levy and his colleagues, however, who gave the first performance on 25 February 1850, but their counterparts in the Leipzig Gewandhaus orchestra (Pohle, Jehnichen, Leichsenring and Wilke) with Julius Rietz conducting. Levy’s virtuosity (and perhaps Schumann’s sense that it might not be wise to spread the difficulties too much) may be attested by the Horn 1 part, which is extremely high and has long passages with no rest (arrangements have been published which redistribute the material somewhat among the players). Perhaps sensing that the piece was unlikely to find many performers, the publishers brought out a version for piano and orchestra. This arrangement published after Schumann’s death is not by him, but possibly by Joachim Raff.

Listening Guide
The title is revealing, and not a misnomer for a concerto in disguise. With a tradition going back at least to Weber’s very influential Konzertstück of c.1821, for piano and orchestra, it describes a form favoured by many Romantic composers, in which the movements of a concert piece with soloist(s) are unified by continuity and by thematic interrelations. The solos can be as brilliant as you like, and are not restricted as to where they can intervene. In Schumann’s Konzertstück they announce themselves after a pair of prefatory chords with a sonorous fanfare. The writing for the quartet of horns is notable throughout the work for giving all four a lot to do most of the time. But the texture is inventive and never thick, despite Schumann’s characteristic doublings in the orchestral parts, where he matches the soloists with two (hand) horns and three trombones, as well as trumpets and a piccolo for added éclat. Some of the solo horn writing has been called ‘recklessly brilliant’: the first horn part frequently rises to a top (concert) F, only to be topped by truly vertiginous As (some of these were removed before the first edition was published in 1851). Nor are the horns’ lyrical possibilities neglected in the contrasting passages. The second movement, Romanze, anticipates the atmosphere and the brassy sounds of the ‘cathedral’ movement of Schumann’s Rhenish Symphony of 1850, in the broad melody of its middle section, which recurs in thematic transformation in the finale. This follows directly, linked by a trumpet call. It is a playful movement, one of whose episodes salutes, as so often in Schumann, Felix Mendelssohn – in this case his Midsummer Night’s Dream music. The final cadential flourish is marked by Schumann ‘with bravura’. Not only the guild will applaud this balancing act! Unplayable? Not any more…

David Garrett © 2006

First performance:
25 February 1850, Leipzig. Conducted by Julius Rietz.

Most recent WASO performance:
5 March 2005. Matthias Bamert, conductor.

Instrumentation:
two flutes and piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets and two bassoons; two horns, two trumpets and three trombones; timpani and strings. timpani and strings.

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)

Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op.67

Allegro con brio
Andante con moto
Allegro–
Allegro

But a scant group of Viennese music-lovers seems to have braved the cold of Thursday 22 December 1808 to attend the Theater-an-der-Wien to witness music history being made. Beethoven himself was playing his G-major Concerto for the first time in public, and he was also to direct the premieres of both his Fifth and Sixth Symphonies; and (since he wanted to give the chorus something spectacular to round off the program) the specially composed Choral Fantasia, Op.80, as well. For good measure, he played an improvisation at the keyboard, and there were choral movements from his Mass in C and the scena Ah! perfido.

Not only was the theatre cold and the program too long, but the orchestra was antagonistic, the music under-rehearsed, and a confusion in the Choral Fantasia forced Beethoven to call a halt and begin again. In such untoward circumstances, Grove declares, are the regenerators of mankind born into the world!

‘So fate knocks at the door,’ Beethoven is reported to have said of the peremptory four-note figure that opens this most famous of symphonies – probably at least a decade after the music was written. It may simply have reflected his mood at that moment. Beethoven was constantly concerned with his personal fate; and he was also prone to toss off casual remarks about his music which tended to be confusing or contradictory. There is no evidence that there was any cogent theme of Fate in his mind while he was writing the symphony.

At all events, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is indisputably a distillation and culmination of purely musical thought processes which had been developing in his mind – and his sketchbooks – for years. Themes for all first three movements exist in sketchbooks dating from at least as early as 1800 and 1801 – which were not for Beethoven years of disillusionment or burgeoning musical Romanticism. And he achieves his objective, after the broad grandeur of the Eroica, of creating a taut, compact symphony of unprecedented intensity. There is not a single surplus note. Conciseness was ensured when Beethoven abandoned after a few performances his original idea of having additional repeats of the scherzo and trio, as in the Fourth Symphony (and, indeed, in the Sixth and Seventh symphonies). Though he never formally forsook the exposition repeat marked in the finale, it is rarely played.

In creating a symphonic drama of hitherto unparalleled power and tautness, Beethoven’s means remain largely the traditional contrasts of subject and counter-subject; contrasts of dynamics and tempo, the drama of key relationships; and the established four-movement structure. His first movement adheres to classical sonata form, with two clearly contrasted groups of subjects, one powerful and assertive, the other gentler, more pliable. As for being built up out of its short, four-note opening figure, it was probably Felix Weingartner who recognised that in fact the opposite is true: the movement is remarkable for the very length and variety of its sentences. The Andante is predominantly reflective but has moments of confident energy which are, however, dispelled by the darkly brooding scherzo and its ominously hushed transition to the finale, where trombones are about to blaze their way into symphonic history for the first time.

Where Beethoven builds on traditional form is in the brilliant bridge from scherzo to finale (an unusual, though not unprecedented, practice). He uses the four-note figure at the opening of the first movement as a motif which has echoes in the scherzo (where it appears on the horns), in the transition to the finale (drum-tap rhythm), and in the finale itself. Also in the finale, a fragmentary return of the scherzo prepares the triumphant recapitulation, which then carries all before it.
Such musical links and back references have both a structurally unifying and dramatic effect, and it is tempting to read a philosophical program into them. The only certainty, however, is that the Fifth Symphony journeys from darkness in C minor, through some musical valley of the shadow of death, to a Beethovenian vision of heavenly light in C major. The composer knew well the example of light blazing out of C minor into the major at the words ‘And there was light’ in Haydn’s Creation.

If the symphony can be construed as in some way a metaphor for the indomitability of the human spirit, then perhaps the triumph of the finale, emerging in starkest contrast from the gloom of the scherzo, asserts a conviction that the quality of achievement is a reflection of the adversity overcome.

Antony Cane © 1978-2011

First performance:
22 December 1808, Vienna.

Most recent WASO performance:
3 November 2018 (Kalgoorlie). Christopher Dragon, conductor.

Instrumentation:
two flutes, piccolo, two oboes, bassoons and contrabassoon; two horns, two trumpets, three trombones; timpani and strings.