Mozart and Bruckner

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: Peter Wallis

Semra Lee-Smith
Violin

Semra’s orchestral career began with the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra in 2000. She started in a tutti position with WASO in 2003 and was appointed Associate Principal 2nd Violin in 2004. In 2009, she won the Assistant Concertmaster job and was Acting Associate Concertmaster from 2014-21.

Semra has been Guest Concertmaster with the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra and has performed with the Australian World Orchestra.

She is co- artistic director of the Darlington Chamber Music series and founding member of the Darlington Ensemble, who recently played their debut concert for Musica Viva.

A passionate advocate of new music, she has been involved in commissions from James Ledger, Emma Jayakumar and Simon Kruit, most recently recording Emma Jayakumar’s Bell Birds Suite for the ABC. Semra’s versatility as a performer has seen her record Troy Roberts’ jazz quartet/string quartet “Xenden Suite”, back Kate Miller-Heidke at One Day in Fremantle and feature as a soloist with WASO.

Photo: Nik Babic.

Daniel Schmitt
Viola

Daniel has been a member of Bayerische Staatsoper Orchestra in Munich and held principal positions with the Royal Flemish Philharmonic and the Royal Opera Orchestra “La Monnaie” in Brussels under the baton of Philippe Herreweghe and Antonio Pappano. He has also appeared as guest principal with the Munich Chamber Orchestra, the Orchestre des Champs Élysées Paris and the Opera Australia Orchestra.

He was the violist in the Lenos String Quartet, which won the National German Music Competition. He has performed with Lenos throughout Europe and performances have been broadcast on SR Kultur, NDR2 (Germany) and Radio DRS (Switzerland). As a chamber musician he has performed at numerous festivals in Europe, the UK, South Korea and Japan. In Australia he has appeared at the Melbourne Recital Centre, performing Schumann’s Piano Quintet with Emanuel Ax, Wilma Smith, Dale Barltrop and David Berlin.

Daniel has held the seat of Principal Viola with WASO since 2019.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)

Sinfonia concertante in E flat for violin, viola and orchestra, K364

Allegro maestoso
Andante
Presto

Mozart was an accomplished violinist, good enough to play his own concertos in public, but it was mainly pressure from his father, a famous violin teacher, which led him to write the concertos and to keep up his practising. His main instrument was the piano, and in string quartets, like many a string-playing composer, he preferred to play the viola. If his violin concertos were a duty, this ‘Concertante Symphony’ for violin with viola was obviously a labour of love. It is one of a sheaf of masterpieces written in 1778-79, including the opera Idomeneo. During his travels of 1778, Mozart had begun writing for musicians outside Salzburg, at Mannheim and in Paris. He was hoping for a professional position which would free him from his native city; and clearly this aim was a great stimulus. This Sinfonia concertante, however, like Mozart’s violin concertos of 1775, was probably intended for musicians in Salzburg, most likely the concertmaster of the orchestra there, Antonio Brunetti, and violinist Joseph Hafeneder.

The sinfonia concertante was a form enormously popular at the time, showing off the skills of a group of instrumentalists from within the fine orchestras which were developing for public concerts. Mozart had recently been in Paris, where the sinfonia concertante craze was at its height, and had composed for performance there a work of this kind featuring his new friends, the wind soloists of the Mannheim orchestra (possibly what survives as the Sinfonia concertante K297b). Usually such works were less tightly written than a symphony, and made more concessions to virtuosity, but Mozart’s K364 is an exception. It reveals elements of the Baroque concerto grosso in the close interplay between the soloists and the band, but the writing is on the scale of a symphony.

Combining violin and viola as soloists was a risky procedure, and especially in the key of E flat major, which doesn’t make many open strings available on either violin or viola. Mozart notated the viola part in D major, and intended the instrument to be retuned a semitone higher, bringing the sounding pitches in line with those of the normally tuned violin. The violist can use many more open strings when fingering in D major, and the extra tension brightens the tone of the viola, helping it to balance the violin and to stand out from the orchestral violas. This scordatura is less necessary on modern, more highly strung violas, and few soloists adopt it, being reluctant to put their instruments temporarily under additional tension.

The first movement, marked ‘majestically’, includes a lengthy orchestral build-up of the kind then being made famous by the Mannheim Orchestra. This is preceded by a marvellous passage where horns and oboes indulge in dialogue with pizzicato strings. A magical moment is the emergence of the two solo instruments from the orchestral mass, and their interplay affectionately and songfully explores the characteristic sound registers of violin and viola in turn.

As in several of Mozart’s great piano concertos in E flat, the slow movement is in the relative minor key, C minor, for Mozart a key of brooding and profound pathos. Here the dialogue of the instruments reaches accents of deep feeling, even pain, yet ever songfully. The finale is lighter, in the rhythm of a contredanse, and its high spirits include many unexpected touches. The two soloists bid farewell in turn in a rising passage of considerable virtuosity. Mozart himself wrote the eloquent cadenzas for this greatest of his string concertos.

David Garrett © 1999

Year of composition:
1779.

First WASO performance:
12 October 1973. Georg Tintner conductor, Ashley Arbuckle (vln), John Dean (vla).

Most recent WASO performance:
24-25 August 2012. Paul Daniel conductor, Giulio Plotino (vln), Giovanni Pasini (vla).

Instrumentation:
two oboes, two horns and strings.

Anton Bruckner (1824-1896)

Symphony No.7 in E

Allegro moderato
Adagio. Sehr feierlich und sehr langsam
Scherzo. Sehr schnell
Finale. Bewegt, doch nicht schnell

At the age of 60, the diffident, pious Anton Bruckner suddenly achieved international fame as a composer with the Seventh Symphony. Bruckner had moved to the imperial capital in 1868 to take up a position at the Vienna Conservatory, and travelled as far afield as Paris and London as one of the greatest organists of the age. But until the mid-1880s, his own music had failed to find a foothold in Vienna’s musical life – partly the result of Bruckner’s idolisation of Wagner, which was anathema in a city where Brahms presided as the resident Great Composer, aided by powerful critics like Eduard Hanslick.

Back in 1873 Bruckner had approached Wagner for permission to dedicate his Third Symphony to the ‘Master of all masters’. While working on the Seventh Symphony, Bruckner later remarked, ‘One day I came home and felt very sad. It occurred to me that the Master would soon die, and at that moment the C sharp minor theme of the Adagio came to me.’ And, indeed, during the composition of the slow movement, Bruckner heard the news of Wagner’s death, incorporating his grief into the final pages of the movement. But the piece as a whole was conceived before Bruckner’s premonition.

The melody with which the first movement begins is a long and very beautiful tune that outlines the key of E major over two octaves, before moving through seemingly distant keys; a ‘false’ close gives way to yet more varied phrases and hints of further tonal exploration before returning to E major for a fuller restatement of the melody itself. The movement displays Bruckner’s habitual use of three contrasting groups of themes, the second of which is what he liked to call a ‘song-period’, and out of these he spins a lengthy series of contrasting musical worlds, using key-relationships for maximum dramatic effect.

The key of C sharp minor, closely related to the work’s ‘home key’ of E major, is avoided throughout the first movement so that its appearance in the second is more emphatic. In this, the premonitory elegy for Wagner, Bruckner introduces four Wagner tubas. As in the slow movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, ‘very slow and very solemn’ material is contrasted with a theme in a different mood, speed and key. Bruckner was working on the climax of the movement – a majestic passage in C major – when he heard of Wagner’s death. He quotes a motive from his Te Deum (associated with the words ‘Non confundar in aeternum’ – let me never be put to shame) but it is in the coda which follows with its almost Wagnerian horn calls that Bruckner farewells the Master.

After the catharsis of the Adagio, Bruckner produces one of his most delightfully energetic scherzos. Again, the movement’s key – A minor – has been avoided so far. The octave and perfect fifth which constitute the theme of this section are the most stable intervals in tonal music, but Bruckner effortlessly plays this stability off against a series of unexpected excursions into different keys, and it proves an amusing contrast to the central Trio section.

The Finale is constructed out of four sections: the first is in E major, and deliberately recalls the first movement in its use of the stable intervals of the common chord; the second and third sections are, respectively, in keys a third above and below E; finally the fourth section, using material based on the first, charts the journey from the key of A back to the home key.

The Seventh’s premiere was in the Leipzig Gewandhaus under Arthur Nikisch in 1884 and the applause lasted for 15 minutes. Wagner conductor Hermann Levi declared it ‘the most significant symphonic work since 1827’. Soon it had been heard throughout Germany as well as in New York, Chicago, Amsterdam, Budapest and London. When it finally was played in Vienna in 1886, Hanslick, predictably, wrote it off as ‘unnatural, blown up, unwholesome, and ruinous’ and his colleague Kalbeck memorably wrote, ‘It comes from the Nibelungen and goes to the devil!’ Actually, it is music about going to heaven, or, as British composer Robert Simpson puts it, ‘a patient search for pacification’.

Adapted from a note by Gordon Kerry © 2002

First performance:
30 December 1884, Leipzog. Arthur Nikisch conducting.

First WASO performance:
20-21 October 1972. Tibor Paul, conductor.

Most recent WASO performance:
26-27 August 2011, Paul Daniel conductor.

Instrumentation:
two each of flutes, oboes, clarinets and bassoons; four horns, four Wagner tubas, three trumpets, three trombones and tuba; timpani, two percussion and strings.