Beethoven's Violin Concerto

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.

Emily Sun
Violin

Emily Sun’s powerful sound and compelling interpretations have earned her international renown, winning the Royal Overseas League Competition (UK) and ABC Young Performers Award (Australia). Emily's debut recording Nocturnes (ABC Classics) with pianist Andrea Lam, was nominated for a 2021 ARIA award.

Adelaide Symphony Orchestra’s Artistin- Association for 2023, Emily continues in this role in 2024, performing with conductors Andrew Litton and Shiyeon Siung, and performs as soloist with the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Johannes Fritzsch.

Recent performances include as soloist with the Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and West Australian Symphony Orchestras with conductors Vasily Petrenko, Mark Wigglesworth, Jaime Martín, and Benjamin Northey; the Classic100 concert broadcast on ABC iView, and the Australian Festival of Classical Music.

Emily has performed across Europe, the UK, and Asia, as guest soloist with the London Mozart Players, the EU Chamber Orchestra, Qingdao Symphony Orchestra, and alongside Maxim Vengerov at Buckingham Palace.

Emily is a Violin Professor at the Royal College of Music London, and plays on a 1760 Nicolò Gagliano violin, kindly loaned by Beares International Violin Society.

Image credit: Shin-Joong Kim

Anna Clyne
(b.1980)

This Midnight Hour (Australian Premiere)

Composer's Notes

The opening to This Midnight Hour is inspired by the character and power of the lower strings of L'Orchestre national d'Île de France. From here, it draws inspiration from two poems – one by Charles Baudelaire and another by Juan Ramón Jiménez. Whilst it is not intended to depict a specific narrative, my intention is that it will evoke a visual journey for the listener.

Jiménez’s poem La musica is very short and concise. [It] immediately struck me as a strong image and one that I chose to interpret with outbursts of frenetic energy—for example, dividing the strings into subgroups that play fortissimo staggered descending cascade figures from left to right in stereo effect. This stems from my early explorations of electroacoustic music.

La musica - by Juan Ramón Jiménez

iLa musica;
-mujer desnuda,
corriendo loca por
la noche pura! -

Music –
a naked woman
running mad through
the pure night

(translated by Robert Bly)

There is also a lot of evocative sensory imagery in Baudelaire’s Harmonie du Soir, the first stanza of which reads as follows:

Voici venir les
temps où vibrant
sur sa tige
Chaque fleur
s’évapore ainsi
qu’un encensoir;
Les sons et les
parfums tournent
dans l’air du soir;
Valse mélancolique
et langoureux
vertige!

The season is at hand
when swaying on its
stem
Every flower exhales
perfume like a censer;
Sounds and perfumes
turn in the evening air;
Melancholy waltz and
languid vertigo!

(translated by William Aggeler)

I riffed on the idea of the melancholic waltz about halfway into This Midnight Hour - I split the viola section in two and have one half playing at written pitch and the other half playing 1/4 tone sharp to emulate the sonority of an accordion playing a Parisian-esque waltz.

— Anna Clyne
Image credit: Christina Kernohan

First performance:
13 November 2015, Théâtre Espace
Coluche, Plaisir. Enrique Mazzola
conducting.

Commissioned by:
L'Orchestre national d'Île de France and Seattle Symphony

First WASO Performance:
This is the Australian Premiere.

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

Ludwig van Beethoven
(1770-1827)

Violin Concerto in D, Op.61

Allegro ma non troppo
Larghetto –
Rondo (Allegro)

In December 1806, Johann Nepomuk Möser reviewed a concert for the Wiener Theaterzeitung at which ‘the excellent Klement’, leader of the orchestra at the Theater an der Wien, ‘also played, besides other beautiful pieces, a Violin Concerto by Beethhofen’. Möser went on to note that the ‘experts’ were unanimous, ‘allowing it many beauties, but recognising that its scheme often seems confused and that the unending repetitions of certain commonplace events could easily prove wearisome’. It is hard to imagine how the critics back then got it so wrong and why there was only one other documented performance during Beethoven’s life. (It was not until Joseph Joachim took the piece up in 1844 that it gained any currency at all.) Beethoven himself may have felt that the work had no future, as he made a version for piano and orchestra for the pianist, composer and publisher Muzio Clementi soon after the premiere.

Beethoven had been working at tremendous speed in the latter half of 1806. Having finally completed the first version of his opera Fidelio, he then in quick succession composed the Fourth Symphony, Fourth Piano Concerto, the three ‘Razumovsky’ string quartets, the Violin Concerto and one or two other things before the end of the year.

The early years of the 19th century, Beethoven’s ‘heroic decade’, saw works that dramatise titanic struggles and epic victories on a scale unimagined by previous composers. This may reflect Beethoven’s own heroic response to the deafness which began to hamper his professional and personal life at the time; it may also reflect radical upheavals in European society: Napoleon’s armies occupied Vienna three times in the course of the decade. But the period also produced works of great serenity such as the Violin Concerto. Still large-scale works, their emotional worlds are far from the violent tensions of the odd-numbered symphonies.

Beethoven had toyed with and abandoned a Violin Concerto in the early 1790s. By the time of the D major work, however, he had composed nine of his ten sonatas for piano and violin. From the 1802 Op.30 set on, he invested these with the same complexity of emotion and expanded scale that we have noted in the symphonies and string quartets. But Beethoven’s interest in the concerto medium was, until 1806, primarily in composing works for himself as soloist – the first four piano concertos; after that time his hearing loss made concerto playing too risky. At one remove, as it were, in this work he could concentrate on the problem of reconciling the principles of symphonic composition – which stress dramatic contention 10 and ultimate integration of contrasting thematic material – and concerto composition, which adds the complication of pitting the individual against the mass.

In the Violin Concerto Beethoven uses a number of gambits to bring about this synthesis. As in several works of this period, the Violin Concerto often makes music out of next to no material; the opening gesture of five drum taps, for instance, seemingly blank at the start, returns several times during the movement, most strikingly when the main material is recapitulated: there the whole orchestra takes up the motif. Similarly, the Larghetto slow movement has been famously described by Donald Tovey as an example of ‘sublime inaction’ – nothing seems to be happening, though in fact subtle changes and variations of material stop the piece from becoming monotonous. The seemingly improvised transition into the last movement dramatises the gradual change from that immobility to the release of energy in the finale. Throughout the work, Beethoven expertly creates and frustrates our expectations: the soloist only enters after a fully symphonic introduction, and only then with an ornamental flourish, rather than any thematic material. The beautiful second theme is, as Maynard Solomon notes, perfectly composed to exploit the richness of the lowest string of the instrument, but the soloist only gets that theme at the movement’s end. This large-scale plotting of the work allowed Beethoven to expand the dimensions of the violin concerto beyond all ‘classical’ expectations and lay the foundation for the great concertos of Brahms and Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky and Sibelius.

Gordon Kerry © 2008

First performance:
23 December 1806, Vienna. Composer conducting; Franz Clement, soloist.

First WASO performance:
31 July 1948. Bernard Heinze, conductor; Ginette Neveu, soloist.

Most recent WASO performance:
9-10 March 2018. Asher Fisch, conductor; Veronika Eberle, soloist.

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