Asher Fisch conducts The Rite of Spring

As we enter the third year of this pandemic, I am grateful to once again be back with WASO, ensuring that orchestral music can continue for the people of Western Australia.

I travelled to many places all over the world in 2021, but Perth still remained, until recently with the border opening, one of the most difficult places to get into! And yet here we are, and I couldn’t be happier to be here for another season of exceptional music.

Western Australia’s approach to the pandemic has continued to be one of the most measured in the world, which has come with challenges for many, including WASO, but has also meant that we can continue performing. We are grateful for the leadership that the Government has shown to keep us safe, enabling the Orchestra to continue performing across the state.

This time last year we opened the season with a new work by one of this country’s most promising talents, Olivia Davies. Though I did not get to conduct Olivia’s newest work, In Waves, which was premiered last week, I hope to conduct more of her works in the coming months and years as Olivia progresses through her three-year tenure as WASO’s Composer in Residence. Paired with our fantastic orchestra, I am sure that Olivia’s talents will only grow.

My own tenure with WASO is now in its eighth year. It has been a great joy to work with this orchestra’s wonderful musicians over this period and I am thrilled that we are presenting some truly monumental works this season. Britten’s War Requiem will bring WASO together with the musicians of ANAM and a chorus of over 150, and after the unfortunate cancellation of our Mahler symphony last year, I can’t wait to perform Mahler’s Third Symphony this year.

Your support has never been more important or more appreciated, and by attending our concerts you ensure that the music continues even through this pandemic.

I look forward to seeing you at a concert this season.

Asher Fisch
Principal Conductor & Artistic Advisor

Asher Fisch appears courtesy of Wesfarmers Arts.

Asher Fisch
Principal Conductor & Artistic Advisor

A renowned conductor in both the operatic and symphonic worlds, Asher Fisch is especially celebrated for his interpretative command of core German and Italian repertoire of the Romantic and post-Romantic era. He conducts a wide variety of repertoire from Gluck to contemporary works by living composers. Since 2014, Asher Fisch has been the Principal Conductor and Artistic Advisor of the West Australian Symphony Orchestra (WASO). His former posts include Principal Guest Conductor of the Seattle Opera (2007- 2013), Music Director of the New Israeli Opera (1998-2008), and Music Director of the Wiener Volksoper (1995-2000).

Born in Israel, Fisch began his conducting career as Daniel Barenboim’s assistant and kappellmeister at the Berlin Staatsoper. He has built his versatile repertoire at the major opera houses such as the Metropolitan Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, San Francisco Opera, Teatro alla Scala, Royal Opera House at Covent Garden, and Semperoper Dresden. Fisch has conducted at leading American symphony orchestras including those of Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, New York, and Philadelphia. In Europe he has appeared with the Berlin Philharmonic, Munich Philharmonic, London Symphony Orchestra, Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, and the Orchestre National de France, among others.

Highlights of Asher Fisch’s 2021-22 season include Otello and Der Rosenkavalier at the Teatro Comunale di Bologna, Adriana Lecouvreur at the Vienna State Opera, a gala concert at the Hungarian National Opera with Kristine Opolais, as well as concerts with the Colorado Symphony, Naples Philharmonic, and New Zealand Symphony Orchestra. Fisch’s 2020-21 season featured guest engagements with the Detroit Symphony, Utah Symphony, Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Dusseldorfer Symphoniker, and a farewell concert at the Bayerische Staatsoper for long-time director Nikolaus Bachler. Other recent seasons included concert and opera engagements with the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood, Cleveland Orchestra at the Blossom Festival, Sydney Symphony, Teatro Massimo Orchestra in Palermo, Carmen, Die Zauberflöte, and Parsifal at the Bayerische Staatsoper, Ariadne auf Naxos with the Bayerische Staatsoper at the Hong Kong Arts Festival, Tannhäuser at the Tokyo National Theater, and Pagliacci and Schitz at the Israeli Opera.

Asher Fisch’s recent recordings with WASO include Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde in 2018, which won Limelight Magazine’s Opera Recording of the Year in 2019, Bruckner’s Symphony No.8 and tenor Stuart Skelton’s first solo album Shining Knight, all of which were released on ABC Classics. Fisch’s recording of Ravel’s L’heure espagnole with the Munich Radio Orchestra won Limelight Magazine’s Opera Recording of the Year in 2017. In 2015, he recorded the complete Brahms symphonies with WASO, released on ABC Classics to great acclaim. His recording of Wagner’s Ring Cycle with the Seattle Opera was released on the Avie label in 2014. His first Ring Cycle recording, of the Helpmann award-winning State Opera of South Australia production, garnered praise and awards including the Prix Lauritz Melchior and Académie du disque lyrique Paris. Fisch is also an accomplished pianist and has recorded a solo disc of Wagner piano transcriptions for the Melba label.

Asher Fisch appears courtesy of Wesfarmers Arts.

Andrew Nicholson
Flute

Andrew studied at Chetham’s School of Music and the RNCM in Manchester.

He has held principal flute positions with the HKPO, Halle, RPO, BBCNOW and WASO. He has also regularly appeared as guest principal flautist with the LSO, LPO,
Opera North, Academy of St Martin in the Fields, Philharmonia, BBC Philharmonic, Bournemouth, City of Birmingham, Malaysia, China Philharmonic, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, London Chamber, Guangzhou, Auckland, Royal Scottish, Scottish Chamber, English Chamber, Hebrides, John Wilson, QSO, SSO, AWO and the Australian Chamber Orchestras.

Andrew has given master-classes at the Guildhall School of Music, Royal Academy, Royal College, UWA, WAAPA, ANAM, and in Hong Kong, Athens, Belgium, Poland, Manchester, Cardiff, New York, Brisbane, Adelaide and Sydney. Andrew has also been the flute tutor with AYO, NYOGB and NYOW.

Andrew is a Trevor James Flutes Global Ambassador.

Andrew’s Chair is generously supported by a philanthopic patron through the Orchestral Partnerships giving program.

Franz Schubert (1797-1828)

Symphony No.8 in B minor, D759
Unfinished

Allegro moderato
Andante con moto

Why is Schubert’s ‘Unfinished’ Symphony so much admired by musicians and their public alike? Because of its lyrical outpouring of one melody after another? Because romantically-minded people are attracted to the idea of the incomplete masterpiece? Or because of the sentimental legend that Schubert was unable to finish his symphony through illness and lack of public appreciation?

The latter idea can be banished by noting that Schubert composed the music in 1822. Still to come, in 1825, was the grandly affirmative ‘Great C major’ Symphony, and in the remaining six years of his life Schubert could have returned to the Unfinished and completed it. Instead, two movements survive, and an incomplete sketch of a third. There have been attempts to finish the symphony, however musicologists these days agree that it should be left as it stands.

The two movements which constitute the Unfinished Symphony seem, on first hearing, almost like two slow movements, one after another. Schubert’s musical thinking is extraordinarily broad, its essential feature being a new kind of long-range harmonic movement: amazing modulations, but all making sense in the whole.

Schubert presented his work to the Styrian Musical Society of Graz, in gratitude for an honorary diploma. He entrusted it to Anselm Hüttenbrenner, a member of the Society, who never delivered it. In 1860, 32 years after Schubert’s death, the score was rescued from Hüttenbrenner, who had kept it in a drawer stuffed full of papers. The first performance was given by the orchestra of the Society of the Friends of Music in Vienna in 1865.

Adapted from a note by David Garrett © 1998

First performance:
17 December 1865, Vienna. Johann von Herbeck conducting.

Most recent WASO performance:
8-9 August 2014. Asher Fisch, conductor.

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

Jacques Ibert (1890-1962)

Flute Concerto

Allegro
Andante
Allegro scherzando

Jacques Ibert taught himself the fundamentals of harmony and piano playing as a boy, in secret because his father objected strenuously to his receiving musical training. Jacques’ perseverance finally overcame his father’s resistance and he entered the Paris Conservatorium in 1911. After war service, he won the Prix de Rome in 1920, and while in Rome wrote his first important composition, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, based on Oscar Wilde’s poem. In 1937 he was appointed director of the Académie de France in Rome, the first musician ever to hold the post. His administrative talents also found an outlet during a period (1955-6) as Director of the French Government Musical Theatres, which included the Paris Opéra.

Ibert’s compositions are mostly elegant, tasteful and witty in a thoroughly Gallic way. Beyond that it is difficult to generalise because his technical fluency enabled him to apply himself successfully to a wide variety of subjects and genres. He is perhaps best known for the orchestral suite Escales (1922); the Divertissement (1930), related to the farce The Italian Straw Hat, a René Clair film; and the one act opera Angélique. To that list should be added the Flute Concerto, a particularly graceful addition to the repertoire of the instrument.

This concerto, published in 1934, is dedicated to the outstanding flautist Marcel Moyse, who died in 1986 aged 97. It is outstandingly fluent and elegant; someone felicitously compared it to a slim volume of light verse, easy enough to be understood at a first reading. In the first movement a toccata-like subject in rapid
semiquavers, announced by the flute after a brief orchestral introduction, is contrasted with a smoothly expressive melody. The second movement has an extended lyrical melody for the flute, accompanied by muted strings; this builds to a climax marked appassionata. When the melody returns, it is played by a solo violin accompanied by the flute. The final movement is in the style of a tarantella. It is technically so difficult that after its first performance it was adopted as a test piece for students at the Paris Conservatorium, and indeed the whole concerto has been much favoured for flute competitions since.

First performance:
1934 in Paris at the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire.

First WASO performance:
1948. Richard Chugg, soloist. Eugene Goossens, conductor.

Most recent WASO performance:
16-17 April 1993. Neil Fisenden, soloist. Vladimir Verbitsky, conductor.

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

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)

Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring)

Part 1 L’Adoration de la terre (Adoration of the Earth)
Introduction
Danse des adolescentes (Dance of the Young Girls)
Jeu du rapt (Ritual of Abduction)
Rondes printanières (Spring Rounds)
Jeux des cités rivales (Games of the Rival Tribes)
Cortège du sage (Procession of the Sage)
L’Adoration de la terre (Adoration of the Earth)
Danse de la terre (Dance of the Earth)

Part 2 Le Sacrifice
Introduction
Cercles mystérieux des adolescentes (Mystic Circles of Young Girls)
Glorification de l’élue (Glorification of the Chosen Virgin)
Evocation des ancêtres (Evocation of the Ancestors)
Action rituelle des ancêtres (Ritual of the Ancestors)
Danse sacrale – L’élue (Sacrificial dance – The Chosen Virgin)

The trouble started as soon as the solo bassoon began its plaintive version of a Lithuanian folksong. Heckling, spreading from the gallery of the new Théâtre des Champs-Élysées into the stalls, became so loud that the choreographer Nijinsky stood on a chair in the wings shouting directions at the dancers who could no longer hear the orchestra. The theatre’s electrician frantically flicked the house lights on and off to try and settle the audience; there was a brawl and the police had to be called. The orchestra soldiered on and gave what those who could hear it describe as a fine performance.

The riot at The Rite of Spring’s premiere is legendary – scholar Richard Taruskin says that Stravinsky ‘spent the rest of his long life telling lies about it’! But it was not the score that caused a fracas among the Philistines. (Debussy’s Jeux – also premiered by Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes – had been booed a fortnight before.) Nijinsky’s choreography (described by Jean Cocteau as ‘automatonlike monotony’) caused the most offence. A year later Pierre Monteux conducted a concert performance in Paris, and Stravinsky experienced the success ‘such as composers rarely enjoy’ as he was carried through the streets like a sporting hero on the shoulders of his audience.

There had, though, never been anything like it. In his two previous ballets for Diaghilev’s company Stravinsky had mined Russian folklore and fairytale: The Firebird was a story of enchanted princesses, ogres and a magic phoenix; Petrushka’s protagonists are fairground puppets. Certainly since the political upheavals of 1905, and arguably well before, folklore had been a powerful force in Russian art. But in 1910, Stravinsky had a vision of ‘wise elders, seated in a circle, watching a young girl dancing herself to death…to propitiate the god of spring’ and drafted a scenario with the designer Nicholas Roerich. (They later fought over whose idea it was.) The work is, as scholar Stephen Walsh puts it, ‘hardly a “story” ballet with characters [but] a strict “liturgical” sequence, a sequence which, we understand, will always happen this way, with different participants but the same meaning’. Stravinsky’s Russian title for the work is better translated as Holy Spring, and its subtitle is ‘Scenes from Pagan Russia’.

Musicologist Paul Griffiths quotes Stravinsky’s long-time assistant Robert Craft’s assertion that the composer ‘repeatedly said that he wrote The Rite of Spring in order “to send everyone” in his Russian past, Tsar, family, instructors, “to hell”’.

This suggests that The Rite attempts to be a ‘clean slate’ untouched by the corruptions of musical ‘civilisation’. The composer later said that he was ‘the vessel through which The Rite passed’, and the sketches suggest that many of his ideas sprang, fully formed, onto the page. At the same time, Stravinsky’s sumptuous orchestration and harmony could not have existed without the music of Glinka and Rimsky-Korsakov; Debussy rightly called the score ‘primitive music with all modern conveniences’. Moreover, Stravinsky long maintained that the opening bassoon melody, whose timbre suggests traditional dudki or reed
pipes, was the only folk tune in the score, but the publication of his sketchbooks in 1969 showed that he had copied out several tunes that found their way into the work.

These tunes are usually relevant in subject matter to the events of the ballet, but as Stephen Walsh puts it, Stravinsky reduces them ‘to simple essences which could then be used as motives of rhythmic and ostinato treatment’.

Walsh goes on to say, ‘What nobody seems to have done before The Rite of Spring was to take dissonant, irregularly formed musical “objects” of very brief extent and release their latent energy by firing them off at one another like so many particles in an atomic accelerator.’ The ‘cells’ that Stravinsky creates out of the simple rhythmic essences of folk tunes are repeated, distorted by the addition of extra beats, interrupted by contrasting cells. The Rite, then, is the ultimate abstraction of Stravinsky’s early ‘Russian’ style, and the foundation for much of his subsequent music.

Gordon Kerry © 2005/13

First performance:
The Ballets Russes gave the first performance of The Rite of Spring on 29 May 1913 at the Théâtre des ChampsÉlysées in Paris. The conductor was Pierre Monteux and the choreographer, Vaslav Nijinsky. The principal dancers were Maria Plitz (Chosen Virgin), Ludmila Guliuk (Old Woman) and Alexander Vorontzov (Sage).

First WASO performance of complete work:
7-8 August 1992. Jorge Mester, conductor.

Most recent WASO performance:
5-6 August 2016. Simone Young, conductor.

Instrumentation:
two piccolos, three flutes, alto flute, four oboes, two cors anglais, three clarinets, two bass clarinets, E flat clarinet, four bassoons, two contrabassoons, eight horns, two Wagner tubas, four trumpets, bass trumpet, piccolo trumpet, three trombones, two tubas, timpani, percussion and strings.