Beethoven & Brahms

Asher Fisch
Conductor

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.

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)

Variations on a Theme by Haydn, Op.56a

The violinist Joseph Joachim once reassured a youthful Brahms, who had pestered him anxiously for an opinion on his new Variations on a theme by Schumann, ‘If I could, I would turn every one of the Variations into a triumphal arch and the theme into a laurel wreath for you to wear as I led you through them, you young Emperor of Music!’

For Brahms, like Haydn and Beethoven before him, the variation form was central to his musical life. While he declared a ‘particular affection’ for the form, which he argued should be used more creatively and with greater freedom, his own exploration of variation form nevertheless remained conservative, a challenge to his ingenuity in remaining faithful to the theme. His creativity shone in spinning off entirely new ideas from fragments of the original theme.

Brahms was at a crossroads when he came, aged 40, to consider a theme from an old manuscript apparently by Haydn. He was in 1873 still three years from completing his long-gestating first symphony. His experience of the art of orchestration was limited to a first piano concerto and a pair of serenades, all composed long before he had even arrived from his native Hamburg in 1862 to make a permanent home in Vienna.

Now, in his Variations on a theme by Haydn, the composer turned two notable corners. Composing the work in two separate versions more or less concurrently, one for two pianos (Op.56b) and one for orchestra (Op.56a), Brahms on one hand closed his career as a composer of major piano works – henceforth there would be only miniatures; and on the other hand he created, triumphantly, the world’s first free-standing variations for orchestra. At the same time, in his confident and subtle mastery of a constantly varying instrumental palette through ten distinct environments (theme, eight variations and finale), he announced his arrival as an orchestrator.

The ‘theme by Haydn’ had been discovered and shown to Brahms three years previously by his Viennese friend Carl Ferdinand Pohl, librarian of the Society of the Friends of Music and Haydn’s first comprehensive biographer. Pohl had unearthed a set of half a dozen wind band divertimenti, or Feldparthien (literally, field partitas), in which it appeared, as the second movement of the last, under the heading Corale St Antonii. All six divertimenti are now considered spurious, possibly by Ignaz Pleyel, and the St Antony Chorale itself perhaps an old Austrian pilgrims’ hymn.

Brahms in his opening statement of the theme consciously imitates the early Classical wind sonorities in the original divertimento. He reserves his upper strings for the actual variations, which follow, as John Horton has suggested, in a loosely symphonic sequence – energetic in the first three variations; Romantically melancholy in the fourth (Andante con moto); scherzo-like in 5, 6 and 8, with Variation 7 (Grazioso) a contrasting centrepiece; and gloriously cumulative in a passacaglia finale which builds in Bachian fashion from a ground bass constantly reiterating the first five bars of the St Antony theme.

The bell-like tolling of the note B flat from the end of the theme echoes constantly through Variation 1, interwoven with sweeping string figures. Variation 2, in the minor, propels each scampering phrase with a peremptory shove, but the more delicate Variation 3 flows placidly, evoking Romantic horn sighs. The poignant expressiveness of the minor-key Variation 4, based on two new, wistfully flowing melodies, is achieved with a deceptive simplicity which refuses to proclaim its extraordinary contrapuntal skill.

The impetuous Variation 5 pits different rhythms against each other within a basic 6/8 metre and a swaggering march follows in the equally brilliant Variation 6. The languorous siciliano of Variation 7 is another contrapuntal tour de force with glowing Brahmsian harmonies. A final, fleeting ghost-like variation – the third in the minor – leads to the solemn ground bass of the finale, a mere ten notes from which Brahms builds a kaleidoscopic edifice, rising inexorably to a majestic return of the full chorale theme.

Brahms’ unprecedented use of a passacaglia, or ground bass, finale to a set of variations is both a homage to the towering example of Bach and an advance hint of the great passacaglia, based on a theme of Bach himself, with which, 12 years later, he would close his fourth, and final, symphony.

Anthony Cane © 2004

First performance:
2 November 1873. Composer conducting.

First WASO performance:
6 February 1951. Eugene Goossens, conductor.

Most recent WASO performance:
5 August 2017. Simone Young, conductor.

Instrumentation:
piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, two trumpets, timpani, triangle, strings.

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770 – 1827)

Symphony No.8 in F, Op.96

Allegro vivace con brio
Allegretto scherzando
Tempo di minuetto
Allegro vivace

The Eighth must surely be a young man’s symphony, bursting on us with the boundless energy of a frisky colt. Yet Beethoven was in his 40s when he composed it. The time he was most busily working on it, following the completion of Symphony No.7 in mid-1812, is widely thought to have been the occasion when he penned the famous letter to his unnamed ‘Immortal Beloved’. He spent that summer in Bohemia, taking the waters of various spas for his notoriously delicate health, and he finished the symphony at Graz in October.

If Beethoven was a middle-aged man helplessly in love, it is not reflected in the robust, down-to-earth vigour of this symphony. But as his friend Franz Wegeler wrote, ‘there was never a time when Beethoven was not in love’; and his compositions, in any case, were the fruit of long periods of gestation, not created on impulse. Even if the Eighth Symphony was, relatively speaking, rather tossed off after the labours of the Seventh, it still derived from sketches going back at least a year.

Since the two symphonies were composed virtually in tandem, and derived from the same collection of sketches, it is hardly surprising that they have characteristics in common - specifically, the use of rhythm as a motive force, some untraditional turns of tonality and, overall, an Olympian stance. But while the Seventh is relatively relaxed and expansive, the Eighth is taut and highly compressed.

Wasting no time with any sort of introduction, Beethoven launches straight into the main theme, self-confident and self-sufficient. The graceful second subject also has not a care in the world, apart from a habit of appearing in the ‘wrong’ key, and having to be corrected. The movement presses forward with such boundless enthusiasm, and to such an exuberant climax in the big coda, that it needs no further emphasis and quietly subsides at the end in evident contentment.

As in the Seventh Symphony, Beethoven does without a true slow movement, but on this occasion he adds a qualification to the Allegretto marking: scherzando. This neat, deceptively straightforward little movement can thus be invested with the light-heartedness of a scherzo, allowing the third movement to be an ‘old-fashioned’ minuet rather than the fierce Beethovenian scherzo which listeners had come to expect.

A scurrying theme in the home key of F major begins the finale in all innocence, pianissimo, only to be crudely dismissed by a loud and irrelevant chord of C sharp. This immediately unleashes the whirlwind. In a remarkable movement, by dint of omitting formal repeats, Beethoven manages (in Robert Simpson’s analysis) to produce two complete developments and two complete recapitulations, together with a coda. And if we thought the C-sharp incursion was a mere accident of history, we encounter a shock when it reappears in the second recapitulation, crashing into the F-major theme with sufficient force to shunt everything unceremoniously into F sharp minor. From this point, the battle is on to re-establish the home key, so that it can be reinforced, with a certain amount of nervous relief, in an emphatic conclusion.

Beethoven conducted the first performance of the Eighth Symphony before a packed house in the Grand Redoutensaal in Vienna on 27 February 1814. The crowd, buoyed by improving news from the war front, was aroused less by the new symphony than both the jingoistic Wellington’s Victory and the earlier Symphony No.7. Beethoven was stung into declaring the new symphony ‘much better’ than its predecessor.

Unconvinced, however, some conductors subsequently sought to inflate the Eighth by replacing the proper second movement with the Allegretto of the Seventh.

There are signs among Beethoven’s sketches that he was contemplating a symphony in D minor as a companion to the pair of 1812, but as the Napoleonic Wars neared their end, the composer was entering a period during which work would be difficult for him, and that project was not to be realised for more than a decade.

Anthony Cane © 2001

First performance:
27 February 1814, Vienna. Composer conducting.

Most recent WASO performance:
31 August 2014. Asher Fisch, conductor.

Instrumentation:
two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani, strings.