A Knight's Tale

Asher Fisch
Principal Conductor & Artistic Adviser

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 2022-23 season include Lohengrin and La forza del destino at the Teatro Comunale di Bologna, and Cavalleria Rusticana & Pagliacci at the Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre, as well as concerts with the Düsseldorfer Symphoniker, Queensland Symphony, Sydney Symphony, and Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra. Fisch’s 2021-22 season featured Adriana Lecouvreur at the Vienna State Opera, a gala concert at the Hungarian National Opera with Kristine Opolais, Otello and Der Rosenkavalier at the Teatro Comunale di Bologna, and concerts with the Colorado Symphony, Naples Philharmonic, and New Zealand Symphony Orchestra.

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.

Sara Macliver
Soprano

Sara Macliver is one of Australia’s most popular and versatile artists, and is regarded as one of the leading exponents of Baroque repertoire.

Sara is a regular performer with all the Australian symphony orchestras as well as the Perth, Melbourne and Sydney Festivals, Pinchgut Opera, the Australian Chamber Orchestra and Australian Brandenburg Orchestra, Musica Viva, and a number of international companies.

Sara records for ABC Classics with more than 35 CDs and many awards to her credit.

In recent years Sara has sung with West Australian Opera, Sydney, Melbourne, West Australian, Tasmanian, Queensland and Adelaide Symphony Orchestras, the Australian String Quartet, St George’s Cathedral and Auckland Philharmonic Orchestra. She also sang with the Sydney Philharmonia, Ten Days on the Island, the Peninsula Summer Festival, Brisbane Camerata, ANAM, Bangalow Festival, St George’s Cathedral and Collegium Musicum amongst many other projects.

Sara has been awarded an honorary doctorate from The University of Western Australia in recognition of her services to singing, and teaches at the Conservatorium there.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
(1756-1791)

The Marriage of Figaro, K.492: Overture

The Marriage of Figaro is based on the French writer Pierre Beaumarchais’ comedy La Folle journée (The Madcap Day), the sequel to his Le Barbier de Séville, the basis of Rossini’s opera The Barber of Seville.

Beaumarchais’ original was regarded as almost seditious by an aristocratic audience on the eve of the French Revolution. It is almost a farce with some of the characters like Don Basilio and Dr Bartolo, recognisable from their Commedia dell’arte prototypes. But Beaumarchais brought the class system to the fore and Figaro the servant was cleverer than his master, The Count.

Mozart and librettist da Ponte softened some of the harsher political aspects, but added an emotional warmth, and the music compensated with greater depth of characterisation. The score contains some of the greatest examples of Mozart’s musical characterisation, timing, and structure. In the overture, the motif played by the strings and bassoon in the opening bars is answered by the winds, building up to a fortissimo orchestral tutti that, thanks to Mozart’s brilliant grasp of musical characterisation, gives us a hint of the mad-cap action that is to follow, when the Count pursues his wife’s maid - and Figaro’s fiancée – Susanna. The anticipation and excitement whipped up by Mozart’s brilliant orchestration makes this overture a favourite concert opener.

Symphony Services Australia ©2006

First performance:
1 May 1786, Vienna.

Most recent WASO performance:
7 August 2022 (Bunbury). Jen Winley, conductor.

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

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
(1756-1791)

Exsultate, jubilate – Motet, K.165

I Allegro ‘Exsultate, jubilate’
Recitativo ‘Fulget amica dies’
II Andante ‘Tu virginum corona’
III Molto allegro ‘Alleluia’

Like the rococo churches in which it was often performed, Austrian church music of the 1700s did not draw a sharp distinction between sacred and secular styles. It was perfectly natural for the 16-year-old Mozart to use the resources of his symphonic and operatic styles in setting this text of rejoicing.

The motet was written in Milan in 1772 for the outstanding castrato Venanzio Rauzzini (1746-1810), who had sung a principal role in Mozart’s opera Lucio Silla ‘like an angel’, according to Mozart’s father Leopold. In 1752 the Berlin composer Quantz had observed that ‘Motet’ was the title used in Italy for a sacred Latin solo cantata sung by one of the best singers during the Mass, after the Credo. Quantz’s description of the form – two arias and two recitatives, finishing with an Alleluia – almost exactly fits the piece Mozart composed, probably for a church of the Theatine Order, San Antonio Abate, in Milan. Later, about 1779, it was revised for performance in Salzburg, with flutes replacing the oboes in the scoring with horns, strings, and organ. The singer was again a male soprano castrato, Francesco Ceccarelli. There are two Salzburg versions, with texts different from each other, and also different from the Milan version – in the first aria and the recitative – to relate them to particular feast days. The Milan version, with its reference to the joyful dawn which follows the night, suggests the Advent or Christmas season. All three versions contain some awkward Latin, but the Milan text is the more poetic.

Exsultate, jubilate is essentially a display piece – as Alfred Einstein describes it, it is a miniature concerto for voice in three movements. Only the brief recitative linking the first and second movements departs from the concerto pattern. The vocal writing found here is similar to Mozart’s early concert arias, but the element of display is restrained, no doubt by the religious text, until the Alleluia. Instead Mozart adopts a fresh tunefulness which has made the work very popular, not least because the final movement provides a gratifying vehicle for a soprano with a mastery of the florid style.

David Garrett © 1998

First performance:
17 January 1773, Milan. Venanzio Rauzzini, soprano.

Most recent WASO performance:
8 November 2002. Vladimir Verbitsky, conductor.

Instrumentation:
two oboes, two horns, continuo (organ) and strings.

Anton Bruckner
(1824-1896)

Symphony No.4 in E flat Romantic
(1878-80 version, Nowak edition)

Bewegt, nicht zu schnell [With movement, not too fast]
Andante quasi allegretto
Scherzo (Bewegt) [With movement] – Trio
(Gemächlich) [Leisurely]
Finale (Bewegt, doch nicht zu schnell)
[With movement, but not too fast]

Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony has long been his most popular. This is a puzzle, since there is a grain of truth in the superficial but amusing observation that Bruckner composed, not nine symphonies, but the same symphony nine times! The Fourth is the only symphony to which Bruckner himself gave a title, and ‘Romantic’ is an apt word for the moods and atmospheres the music evokes. Bruckner went further: when asked to explain his symphony, he invented (after composing it) an imaginary program in which the first movement is supposed to represent a medieval city at dawn, trumpet calls signalling the opening of the city gates, knights riding out into the countryside where they are surrounded by the bird calls and magic of the forest. Bruckner’s program is best ignored – this unsophisticated man provided it to oblige well-meaning friends, and the Fourth is no more programmatic than any of his other symphonies. Bruckner once said of a friend’s program for the Seventh Symphony, ‘If he has to write poetry, why does he have to pick on my symphony?’

Bruckner reluctantly tried to explain his music because its first audiences found it so hard to understand. They were not helped by Vienna’s music critics, particularly the powerful Eduard Hanslick, champion of Brahms, and deeply prejudiced against the Wagner disciple, Bruckner. When the Vienna Philharmonic played through the first version of the symphony shortly after Bruckner completed it in late 1874, all except the first movement was pronounced ‘idiotic’. The most famous of all Bruckner stories presages the success of the revised Fourth Symphony at its first performance, at a Vienna Philharmonic concert conducted by Hans Richter in February 1881. After a rehearsal, Bruckner gratefully approached Richter and slipped a coin into his hand. ‘Take it and drink a beer to my health,’ said the delighted composer.

Bruckner’s symphonies demanded a new way of listening. He is often tagged ‘the Wagnerian symphonist’, but his debt to Wagner was very partial: he studied Tristan und Isolde from a piano score without text, and when he went to hear Die Walküre he is reported to have asked someone after the performance, ‘Tell me, why did they burn the woman at the end?’ Even the orchestral and harmonic innovations in Bruckner which sound so Wagnerian – the chromatic harmony, the rich brass scoring, the expressive use of the massed strings – are present in embryo in Bruckner’s earliest orchestral music, before he became familiar with Wagner.

The true sources of the musical craft of this church-trained teacher and organist from Upper Austria lie in that country’s musical tradition – in Beethoven and even more in Schubert. Bruckner’s symphonies are not dramatic in Wagner’s sense, nor dialectical or argumentative in Beethoven’s. His inspiration, like Schubert’s, is lyrical, and the music is built into long paragraphs, put side by side, and compared by one musician to a series of terraces. ‘Schubert,’ wrote the great English musicologist Sir Donald Tovey, ‘is always ready to help Bruckner whenever Wagner will permit.’

The spirit of Bruckner hidden behind the ‘Wagnerian’ sound is entirely different from Wagner’s. As Tovey puts a truth obvious to anyone who knows Bruckner well, he never forgets the high altar of his Catholic church, nor, one might add, the magnificent organ of the Augustinian monastery of St Florian, where he first learnt music. The simple religious devotion of the man can be heard in the developments of the second subject of the Romantic Symphony’s first movement, and in the magnificent brass chorales which recur in the last movement.

It is often called organists’ music, and certainly Bruckner’s fondness for contrapuntal devices such as inversion, augmentation and diminution is very obvious in the symphonies, and shows his deep learning in the methods of the old church composers. Bruckner was one of the great improvisers at the organ, but his symphonies, despite their vast scale, are never rambling. His orchestra often sounds like an organ, but as Tovey observes, this is because it is completely free of the mistakes of the organ-loft composer. Bruckner is master of the orchestra.

Perhaps the popularity of Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony is chiefly due to its memorable opening. The mysterious beginning of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony fascinated Bruckner, and it has been said that he couldn’t get a symphony under way without a tremolo. It is not a symphony which starts, but the beginning of music itself: major and minor horn calls sounding the interval of a fifth, gradually rousing the woodwind to join in. The string tremolos continue, after a climax, as accompaniment to the second subject, and the characteristic ‘Bruckner rhythm’ of a duplet and a triplet is heard. The recapitulation starts with the opening horn calls, now surrounded by a flowing figure in muted violins, and they also provide the material of the elaborate coda.

The slow movement is an elegiac march in C minor, the relative minor key. Whereas the slow movement of Beethoven’s Ninth, often invoked as Bruckner’s model, consists of variations on two themes, the returns of Bruckner’s broad main theme are separated by an episode that returns twice, a chantlike theme for the violas heard against pizzicato notes from the other strings. Each statement of the main theme is more richly scored and displays more movement than its predecessor, rising at last to a great climax before a solemn coda.

The last two movements were subject to the revisions and second thoughts so typical of Bruckner’s career as a symphonist. Between 1878 and 1880, years after the fiasco of the first readthrough, Bruckner wrote a completely new Scherzo, and revised the Finale extensively. The success of the first performance under Richter protected the Fourth Symphony from further major revision by the composer.

Bruckner’s description of the Scherzo as a hunt with horn calls, and the Trio as a dance melody played to the hunters during the rest, is the only useful though obvious part of his ‘program’. The scale of this sounding of the horn, however, suggests King Mark’s moonlight hunt in Tristan und Isolde, or even the Ride of the Valkyries, more than Bruckner’s bucolic ‘hunting of the hare’. The Trio, by contrast, is an Austrian peasant dance with which Haydn, Mozart and of course Schubert would have felt at home.

The Finale is the longest movement, a feature of the overall balance of the symphony again suggested by Beethoven’s Ninth. As in Beethoven, there are reminiscences here of the earlier movements. A three-note descending phrase is heard in the introduction, recalling the opening of the symphony, while the brass remember the Scherzo. This phrase is gradually revealed as the main theme, played in unison by the whole orchestra. The second thematic group is dominated by a C minor melody for violins and violas, later combined with a lively woodwind motif. Themes from all the movements occur, combined most artfully with the new thematic material, as Bruckner works his way to a restatement of the symphony’s opening theme in the home key. The brass dominates the coda, with the motto of the symphony’s first pages.

David Garrett © 2002
Commissioned by Symphony Australia

This work, published by MWV/Bärenreiter Verlag, has been supplied by Clear Music Australia Pty Ltd as exclusive hire agents for Bärenreiter in Australia.

First performance:
20 February 1881, Vienna. Hans Richter conducting.

Most recent WASO performance:
2 August 2014 (1874 version). Simone Young, conductor.

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