Elgar's Cello Concerto

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.

Daniel Müller-Schott
Cello

With technical brilliance and intensive expressiveness, with intellect and emotional esprit, Daniel Müller-Schott is celebrated as one of the most sought-after cellists in the world. Notable conductors he collaborates with include Marc Albrecht, Karina Canellakis, Thomas Dausgaard, Christoph Eschenbach, Iván Fischer, Alan Gilbert, Neeme Järvi, Cristian Măcelaru, Susanna Mälkki, Andris Nelsons, Gianandrea Noseda, Andrés Orozco-Estrada, Kirill Petrenko, Michael Sanderling and Krzysztof Urbański.

Müller-Schott’s 21/22 season highlights include concerts with Filarmonica della Scala, Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, Orchester der Komischen Oper Berlin, Stuttgarter Philharmoniker, Dortmunder Philharmoniker, Frankfurter Opern- und Museumsorchester, Copenhagen Philharmonic, Turku Philharmonic Orchestra, Orquesta Sinfónica de Castilla y León, Budapest Festival Orchestra as well as further afield with Borusan Istanbul Philharmonic Orchestra, Dallas Symphony Orchestra, NHK Symphony Orchestra, Singapore Symphony Orchestra, West Australian Symphony Orchestra and Melbourne Symphony
Orchestra.

He plays the “Ex Shapiro” Matteo Goffriller cello, Venice, 1727.

Image credit: Uwe Arens.

Edward Elgar (1857-1934)

Cello Concerto in E minor, Op.85

Adagio – Moderato –
Lento – Allegro molto
Adagio
Allegro – Moderato – Allegro, ma non troppo

Elgar’s career reached its last zenith with his Violin Concerto in 1910, and Second Symphony in 1911. Between them and this 1919 Cello Concerto – his last major work – Elgar faced down worsening prospects in almost every aspect of his life, from the personal challenges of age, ill-health and bereavement, to the professional affront of being elbowed aside by younger colleagues. There was also the war. While Britain’s youth marched into France in August 1914 singing ‘It’s a long way to Tipperary’, Elgar’s Land of Hope and Glory – composed during the Boer War as trio of his first Pomp and Circumstance March (1901) – was re-mobilised at home as a patriotic anthem. Rendered semisuperfluous by his own old tune, Elgar, at 57, struggled to find a new wartime voice in works like Carillon, a musically slight but eloquent response to the tragedy in Belgium. His more substantial choral score, The Spirit of England, setting war poems by Laurence Binyon, appeared in 1916-17, however it was Binyon’s lines commemorating the millions fallen (‘They shall grow not old … Age shall not weary them …), and not Elgar’s music for them, that everyone remembered.

Binyon, by day, was a curator at the British Museum under Elgar’s close friend, Sidney Colvin, who first suggested Elgar turn Binyon’s poems into the ‘wonderful Requiem for the slain’ that The Spirit of England became. Binyon himself approached Elgar again immediately the Armistice was declared with a request to set his new ode ‘Peace’. But by letter on 18 November 1918, Elgar demurred: ‘I do not feel drawn to write peace music somehow … the whole atmosphere is too full of complexities for me to feel music to it.’ He had anyway, as his wife Alice recorded in her diary, already conceived another ‘lament which should be in a war symphony’, music that evolved over the spring and summer of 1919 into ‘a real large work & I think good and alive’, as he described the ‘nearly completed’ concerto in a letter to Colvin and his wife Frances on 26 June, asking permission to dedicate it to them. On 27 October Elgar himself, out of duty to soloist Felix Salmond, reluctantly proceeded to direct the premiere, well knowing it was destined for near disaster after his co-conductor, Albert Coates, used up most of the London Symphony’s available rehearsal time preparing Scriabin’s Poem of Ecstasy. It was not until Elgar and Beatrice Harrison made their 1928 recording that a new public, many of them unfamiliar with his earlier successes, began to appreciate the work as a masterpiece in its own right.

The score is laid out in four movements, though listeners tend to hear the first and second movements, played without break, as a single span. Whereas his violin concerto opened into a conventionally spacious orchestral introduction, pending the princely arrival of its soloist, Elgar sets his cello in a more intimate frame. Denied welcoming brass or upper strings, the brief opening cello mode (Adagio) sets its own unusually pared-back terms – hereinafter will be lyricism, light orchestration, simple layouts. The violas, eerily unaccompanied, announce the dreamy, modal, much-loved main theme (Moderato), its rocking rhythm Elgar’s characteristic pastoral lilt. The winds introduce the airy, major-tending contrasting theme, which the cello then sets about varying, before the main theme simply returns. A longer, second cello recitative (Lento) inducts into faster, lighter scherzo-like Allegro molto, the cello driving the music forward with its scrubbing semiquavers. Elgar anticipated that the Adagio, despite its anticipatory half-close, would often be played without the rest of the concerto, and scored it with just strings and wind sextet. The cello melody gives the uncanny impression of being an internal dialogue between two separate voices, higher and lower, each merging in and out of the countermelodies of the supporting strings. The finale opens, exceptionally, announcing its fragmentary theme (Allegro) without the cello. The cello then reworks it in a parenthetic recitative and short cadenza (Moderato), before it takes over fully (Allegro, ma non troppo). The soloist sweetly but firmly pulls the music up, introducing its arcing subsidiary idea, then carried on by flowing semiquavers into the extensive development. There’s a heady reprise of the fast theme, echoes of earlier quiet asides, and a penultimate throwback to the concerto’s opening gesture, caught up into a rapid, surging close.

© Graeme Skinner 2014

First performance:
27 October 1919, London. Composer conducting.

Most recent WASO performance:
2 August 2014. Alban Gerhardt, cello. Simone Young, conductor.

Instrumentation:
two each of flutes (one doubling piccolo), oboes, clarinets and bassoons; four horns, two trumpets, three trombones and tuba; timpani and strings.

Anton Bruckner (1824-1896)

Symphony No.3 in D minor (1889 version)

Mehr bewegt, misterioso
Adagio, bewegt, quasi Andante
Ziemlich schnell
Allegro

‘…I am still too deeply moved by its reception by the Philharmonic audience, who must have recalled me at least twelve times, over and over again…’ [Bruckner to Göllerich - December 1890, on the first performance of the revised Third Symphony]

At the first performance of the Third Symphony, 13 years previously, in the same venue, with the same orchestra (and probably many of the same listeners), Bruckner had suffered a humiliation that was surely expunged by this new reception. Anton Bruckner, just six years from his death, was at last rapturously received by an enthusiastic public.

Yet following the 1877 premiere, the critic Hanslick could write that the Third Symphony presented ‘a vision of how Beethoven’s Ninth befriends Wagner’s Walküre and finds itself under her horse’s hooves…That fraction of the audience which remained to the end consoled the composer for the flight of the rest.’

Why was Bruckner so often rejected? He was not the first composer to find critics hostile and audiences puzzled, but it is difficult to imagine how a late Romantic symphony could initially cause such antipathy and then later such respect. The fickleness of time? The ‘error’ of a naïve Bruckner declaring himself a ‘Wagnerian’ to the Brahms-loving and Wagner-hating Viennese critics? Perhaps, but even now the listening world seems divided into two camps: those who see Bruckner as the leader of symphonic music into the 20th century and those who see him on a road to nowhere: composing the same symphony nine times.

Many regard Bruckner as an influential symphonist in a way that Brahms wasn’t. It is possible to say that without Bruckner’s symphonies (and his masses) Mahler would not have been able to stretch the symphonic form both emotionally or structurally – Brahms was an apotheosis while Bruckner was a bridge into the grandness of the late-Romantic period.

Yet throughout the Third Symphony, though the listener hears the echo of both Beethoven and Wagner, and is also given a foretaste of Mahler, the influences of Brahms and even Dvorák are present as well. This is especially so in the third movement: a Slavonic-like Scherzo.

The Third Symphony, or rather the first version of the Third Symphony, was dedicated to Richard Wagner. Bruckner saw Wagner as his compositional mentor, though in many ways this is a wondrous contradiction given the pantheistic attitude of the opera composer and the devout Christianity of the symphonist. In every version of the Third there is a motif here or a theme there that could be from Tristan or Die Walküre. Bruckner is never as chromatic in his orchestral palette as Wagner, but is certainly influenced by that composer’s studied slowness of thematic development. In this present instance, Bruckner also derives such measured development from the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven (with which it shares the key of D minor) and, to a lesser degree, the Ninth of Schubert.

Possibly one of the most interesting contrasts between Wagner and Bruckner is the latter’s use of what is a relatively small orchestra – certainly smaller than Beethoven’s Ninth. No vast horn sections, cor anglais or six harps – yet Bruckner is able to elicit, through skillful orchestration, powerful fortes and startling rhythmic effects without recourse to the Wagnerian battery of brass, percussion and quadruple winds.

Structurally it is impossible to hear the beginning of the Third Symphony without being reminded instantly of the opening of Beethoven’s Ninth – the same tonal uncertainty exists. But it is through Bruckner’s different direction that we know we are at the end of the 19th century, not its early decades. The use of abrupt silences and deftly unprepared harmonic shifts announce both Bruckner’s confidence and strangeness.

The introspective nature of the second movement is created through the use of passages that echo Bruckner’s unaccompanied sacred motets. The movement concludes with the distinctly pagan ‘Sleep’ motif from Die Walküre.

The Ländler dance of the third movement Scherzo is rather madcap and, couched as it is in D minor, there is a sense of disquiet. The companion Trio, in A major, is a far simpler and almost comic excursion into the peasant lands of Bruckner’s forebears – there’s even a hint (conscious or otherwise) of the peasant dance from Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony. The structure is Classical in form, but more importantly, it serves as a template for the Mahler dances and scherzos that were to follow a decade later.

The final movement is a consummation of the themes and motives developed over the previous three movements, with chorale interjections from the horns and
vigorous sections for the whole brass section again, this time unmistakably from Die Walküre. The return of the opening theme – unexpectedly, and in D major – is a masterstroke and displays again Bruckner’s command of form and theatre.

It is, however, Bruckner’s use of motives that gives the clearest indication of Wagnerian influence. Rather than a straightforward principal melodic line, music is made through the linking of rhythmic and melodic motives and through their continual return in various guises – you don’t go out whistling the tunes from a Bruckner symphony but you may tap out a theme or two. In every movement of the Third there are clearly identifiable melodic cells, menacingly announced by the trumpet at the beginning of the first movement; surreptitiously by the strings in the third; triumphantly by the brass in the last.

So important are motives in Bruckner that they link not only internal sections within each movement, and the movements to each other, but also reappear in other works, both vocal and instrumental, across decades. This represents the differences that separated Bruckner from his peers, and the idiomatic technique that so excited and inspired the young Mahler (present at the disastrous premiere of the Third as a 17-year-old student).

The revisions that took place between the time Bruckner showed the Third to Wagner at Bayreuth in 1873, and the triumphant performance in Vienna of the truncated third version in 1890, present problems as well as delights. There is an argument put forward by some recent musicologists that the Third Symphony of 1873, seen by Wagner and never heard by Bruckner in performance, is the ‘best’ version; the other two are simply shortened and cleared of their Wagnerian quotations in the hope of wider acceptance. Others believe that the version published in 1890 and revised by both Bruckner and his pupils represents the composer’s ultimate view. Whatever the arguments, there can be no doubt that the differences which exist over the two decades of composition make the ‘Final version’ from 1889 (which we hear in this performance) a tighter and more mature work. Such a revision was surely influenced by the triumphs that came to Bruckner in the 1880s, not only in Germany, but also in the UK, the rest of Europe and the US. This shorter version, with the orchestra pared of its harp, percussion and piccolo, could also represent an ‘audience-friendly’ symphony. Neither Bruckner, nor his champions, the Schalk brothers and Ferdinand Löwe, had forgotten the debacle of 1877. Bruckner allowed changes and even compositional additions to be made by the Schalkbrothers, though Mahler was against such revisions at the time. This final version, while controversial, was sanctioned by an active, successful and authoritative composer.

Godliness, to the point of obsession, has often been a theme in discussion of Bruckner as man and composer. As with Bach and to some extent Haydn before him, Bruckner’s music making was in the service of God. His compositions, improvisations and conducting were an offering to God. The scholar Deryck Cooke puts it best when he says ‘Experiencing Bruckner’s symphonic music is more like walking around a cathedral, and taking in each aspect of it, than like setting out on a journey to some hoped-for goal.’

Perhaps this lack of worldliness, coupled with insularity and insecurity, was the basis for Anton Bruckner’s failure to be an unquestionably acclaimed composer until the close of his life. It could also be that he was the first victim of the modern concept of the composer as ‘commodity’; while ironically, the dedicatee of the Third Symphony, Richard Wagner, was the first great self-promoting success.

David Vivian Russell
Symphony Australia © 2000

First performance, original edition:
16 December 1873, Vienna. Composer conducting.

Most recent WASO performance:
18 July 1981. Albert Rosen, conductor.

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