Tchaikovsky's Pathétique

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 two weeks ago, 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.

Maria Grenfell (b.1969)

River Mountain Sky

Commissioned by the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra to mark Tasmania’s Bicentenary, River Mountain Sky suggests an impression of the beautiful island that has been my home since 1998. It celebrates a landscape of rivers and mountains, painted by orange and pink skies at dawn and dusk; a landscape crowned by dramatic cloud formations that give way to quiet nights when stars sparkle across a clear clean southern sky. River Mountain Sky portrays mist over the estuary, sunshine dancing off a bright blue river and cascades of rushing water, yielding to darkness and the peace of evening.

Maria Grenfell © 2004

Year of composition:
2004.

Most recent WASO performance:
This is the first performance by WASO.

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

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)

Piano Concerto No.24 in C minor, K.491

Allegro
Larghetto
Allegretto

Mozart was so busy between October 1785 and April 1786 that he didn’t even have time to write letters home. Even by his own standards he got through a huge number of major works: a violin sonata, several pieces for the Masonic Lodge, various ‘insert’ pieces for other operas, some works for wind ensembles, a ‘musical comedy’ Der Schauspieldirektor (The Impresario), three piano concertos and his epochal opera, The Marriage of Figaro.

However, after presenting the C minor concerto in Vienna on 7 April Mozart withdrew from public performance. This inevitably spawned a number of more or less fanciful theories, including conjecture that the concerto’s uncompromising nature was supposedly not to Viennese taste and, more curiously, that Mozart’s fingers were damaged from constant playing.

Politically, things were strained in Vienna at the time with the Emperor Joseph II determined to modernise his realm and offer a greater degree of liberty than his predecessor. His reforms were inconsistent, however, and his intervention in a murder case led to a gruesome public execution taking place close to Mozart’s home as he prepared to write this concerto.

To what extent might all this bear on the music? It is unique in Mozart’s output in several ways: it uses a large orchestra for a vast range of effects; it avoids virtuosic display for its own sake; its first movement is in triple time (itself unusual); the opening theme, characterised by downward steps followed by wide upward leaps, is broken into progressively smaller units by short, gasping silences. The turbulence this creates prefigures Beethoven (who declared he could never surpass this piece), and has led commentators ever since to describe the piece as ‘tragic’ or ‘demonic’. Mozart’s biographer Maynard Solomon has noted that in the slow movement of this, as in other works of this time, Mozart summons up ‘every gradation of emotion – from terror to vague feelings of unease, from unbearable intense pleasures bordering on ecstasy to a floating placidity and contentment’. And again, in the finale Mozart uses a form beloved of Beethoven and puts his theme through a set of eight variations, exploring a wide range of emotional worlds in the process.

The other factor in the equation is Figaro, of whose importance (both musically and politically) Mozart was well aware. Whether the turmoil and glimpses of beatific peace in this work are the result of Mozart’s response to his circumstances and the times will remain an open question. We can however point out that this work issues from the composer who was in the process of revolutionising the way in which human emotions and relationships could be depicted in music.

Adapted from a note by Gordon Kerry © 2002

Year of composition:
Mozart entered this concerto in his thematic catalogue on 24 March 1786, and may have given its first performance in Vienna on 7 April of the same year. No cadenzas by Mozart survive for this concerto.

First WASO Performance:
20-21 June 1992. David Porcelijn, conductor.

Most recent WASO performance:
21-22 July 2006. Stephen Kovacevich, piano & Lawrence Renes, conductor.

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

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840 – 1893)

Symphony No.6 in B minor, Op.74, Pathétique

Adagio – Allegro non troppo
Allegro con grazia
Allegro molto vivace
Finale (Adagio lamentoso – Andante)

The original audience for the Sixth Symphony was uncomprehending and ambivalent. Tchaikovsky had expected this, writing to his nephew and the dedicatee, ‘Bob’ Davidov, that he wouldn’t be surprised if the symphony were ‘torn to pieces’, even though he considered it his best and most sincere work. The critic Hermann Laroche suggested that audiences who ‘did not get to the core’ of the symphony would ‘in the end, come to love it’. As it turned out, it took them only 12 days. In the intervening period its composer had died, and for the second performance, in a memorial concert, it was promoted with the composer’s subtitle: Pathétique (or Pateticheskaia Simfoniia – ‘impassioned symphony’ – as he had conceived it in Russian). The symphony was declared a masterpiece.

The myth of the-Pathétique-as-suicidenote (not to mention Tchaikovsky’s ‘suicide’ itself) has been more or less debunked in the past two decades. There are no grounds for doubting that Tchaikovsky died from post-choleric complications; the ‘court of honour’ theory has been undermined; and his social, financial and artistic situation all speak against any other motivation for suicide, even if he continued to be troubled by his homosexuality. The Sixth Symphony, specifically, seems to have been a source of immense pride, satisfaction and joy to him. And shortly after its premiere he’s reported to have said, ‘I feel I shall live a long time.’

He was wrong. His audience, now in mourning and seeking ‘portents’, immediately heard the Sixth Symphony (the Pathétique) in a new way. New significance was given to the appearance in the first movement of an Orthodox burial chant, ‘Repose the Soul’ – a hymn sung only when someone has died – and to the otherworldly, dying character of the adagio finale.

Even if the symphony is not a suicide note, there is a programmatic and semi-autobiographical underpinning that is the source of its unusual form and turbulent emotions. Tchaikovsky admitted the existence of a program but was cagey about the details, perhaps because it reflected his romantic feelings for Davidov. The closest we have is a sketched scenario, devised originally for an abandoned symphony in E flat but appearing to correspond with much of the Sixth Symphony:

Following is essence of plan for a symphony Life! First movement – all impulse, confidence, thirst for activity. Must be short (Finale death – result of collapse). Second movement love; third disappointment; fourth ends with a dying away (also short).

There are aspects of this program and the Sixth Symphony that suggest suffering, but for Tchaikovsky the composition of the symphony was a cathartic experience rather than an expression of current sufferings. He himself wrote: ‘Anyone who believes that the creative person is capable of expressing what he feels out of a momentary effect aided by the means of art is mistaken. Melancholy as well as joyous feelings can always be expressive only out of the Retrospective.’

In its art this is Tchaikovsky’s most innovative symphony. He dares to conclude with a brooding slow movement and uses boldly dramatic gestures to give the music its emotional impulse. The ‘limping’ elegance of the second movement waltz would have been less surprising, to Russians at least – its five-beat metre was a part of a tradition that was embraced by Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov and Mussorgsky (in his Pictures at an Exhibition), and later Rachmaninov (in The Isle of the Dead).

In the Sixth Symphony Tchaikovsky comes to terms with his professed inadequacies in structural matters. His solution in the first movement was to extend the exposition section, so well suited to his melodic gifts, and to compress the development section in which he felt his skills inadequate. The music begins in the depths with the dark colour of the bassoon and yet somehow Tchaikovsky sustains a downward trajectory, or the impression of one, for the whole work.

In the third movement the idea of ‘disappointment’ is replaced by something more malevolent. In purely musical terms it conflates two musical figures – feverish tarantella triplets and a spiky march – but the juxtapositions and incursions into each other’s thematic territory create a disturbing sense of antagonism. The movement’s applause-provoking conclusion could be triumphant, or it could be the crash of self-delusion.

The finale may not fit the formula established by Tchaikovsky’s classical predecessors, but within the emotional journey of the symphony its stark sense of tragedy provides an inevitable conclusion – all the more powerful for the grace and jauntiness of the preceding movements.

Yvonne Frindle © 2008

First performance:
28 October 1893, St Petersburg. Tchaikovsky, conductor.

First WASO performance:
19 September 1942. E.J. Roberts, conductor.

Most recent WASO performance:
3-4 June 2016. Daniel Blendulf, conductor.

Instrumentation:
three flutes (third doubling piccolo), two oboes, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion and strings.