Music of Ecstasy

I am so excited to be back in Perth with my orchestra to start the season. 2023 is set to be a wonderful year as we welcome back some much-loved international and Australian guests and showcase the depth of talent we have here in Western Australia and indeed within the orchestra. I am delighted that in 2023 we feature several WASO Principals as soloists, and that you, our audience, will get to experience their wonderful artistry.

WASO has a proud history of supporting new Australian music and this year is no exception. We premiere five new works across three different concert series, including two works by our Composer in Residence Olivia Davies. I’m excited to be conducting one of Olivia’s works, as well as the world premiere of Andrew Schultz’s Bassoon Concerto which he has written for WASO Principal Bassoon Jane Kircher-Lindner.

As I’m sure you all know, the music of Richard Wagner has played a big part in my conducting career and so I am thrilled to conduct Act I of Die Walküre in May. This opera is such an important work and I have been wanting to bring it to WASO for many years. I’m eager to give audiences a deeper understanding of this incredible score and so my new Discover concert is the perfect opportunity. It is also no secret that I love performing Romantic works, so the other concert in this series, Discover: Bruckner, will also be a highlight for me this season.

In 2023 I celebrate 10 years as WASO’s Principal Conductor and I’m so delighted that we can continue our artistic journey together. We have tackled the masterworks of the repertoire, explored new works and concert formats and enjoyed some truly exceptional music making together. I look forward to returning to key works with fresh insight and continue exploring fresh repertoire for you to enjoy.

WASO’s Assistant Conductor Jen Winley joins me on this journey again in 2023. It has been a joy to see Jen’s development over the last year, and a pleasure to see her career blossoming across Australia.

There is so much to look forward to in the 2023 WASO season with old favourites and new experiences for everyone.

Thank you for your incredible support of this wonderful orchestra and I look forward to continuing our musical journey together.

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 2022-23 season include Lohengrin and La forza del destino at the Teatro Comunale di Bologna, Cavalleria Rusticana & Pagliacci at the Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre, and Tannhäuser at Opera Australia, 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.

Laurence Jackson
Violin

Laurence Jackson studied with Emanuel Hurwitz, Maurice Hasson and Anne-Sophie Mutter. He was a prize-winner at the 1985 Yehudi Menuhin ‘Concours de Paris’ Competition and won 3rd Prize at the 1st Sarasate Violin Competition in Pamplona, Spain.Laurence received 1st Prize at the 17th International Violin Competition 'Dr Luis Sigall' held in Vina del Mar, Chile.

Since making his Royal Festival Hall debut in 1990, Laurence has been Concertmaster of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra from 2005-2015 and in 2016, Laurence was appointed as 1st Concertmaster of the West Australian Symphony Orchestra.

Other guest leading includes the BBCSSO, London Philharmonic, Philharmonia, RSNO, BBC Philharmonic, Calgary Festival Orchestra, Trondheim SO, San Francisco Ballet and Bergen Philharmonic. In Australia, he has been guest Concertmaster for the MSO, TSO and QSO.

Between 1994 to 2006, Laurence was leader of the Maggini Quartet, with whom he regularly toured throughout the USA, Canada and Europe to much critical
acclaim. Worldwide sales of their recordings for their Naxos English Music series have exceeded 100,000 discs. He has recorded the John Jeffreys Violin Concerto (Meridian) and the Frank Martin Violin Sonata (ASV) with Iain Burnside (piano). Laurence, with the pianist Ashley Wass, has also recorded two discs for Naxos of the complete repertoire for violin and piano by Sir Arnold Bax.

Laurence is an Honorary Fellow of both Brunel University, London and Canterbury Christ Church University and he was awarded a Fellowship of the Royal Academy of Music in 2013. He plays a violin made by J. B. Vuillaume, circa 1850.

Image credit: Nik Babic

Rod McGrath
Cello

At the age of 15 Rod was appointed Principal Cello of Dudley Opera. He went on to become Principal Cello of the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, performing at the BBC Proms and the Edinburgh Festival with Boulez and Menuhin.

In Rod’s first term at The Royal Academy of Music he was appointed Principal Cello of the Academy’s Symphony Orchestra and performed Shostakovich’s Second Cello Concerto with his friend Simon Rattle. He also won the Royal Overseas League competition playing in the Hunt Quartet. During Rod’s third year at the age of 21, he was asked to join The London Philharmonic Orchestra as Sub Principal. Following this he was appointed Co-Principal of The London Symphony Orchestra where he performed with the most eminent conductors in the world and on many famous film tracks.

Rod became Principal Cello of WASO in 1997 and plays on a Duke cello c1750 loaned by June and the late Chris Johnson of Cambridge, England.

Image credit: Nik Babic

Carl Maria von Weber
(1786-1826)

Oberon: Overture

When Charles Kemble, the lessee of Covent Garden, offered Weber a commission for a new opera, the composer, stricken with tuberculosis, accepted in the hope that it would provide financial support for his family on his death. Oberon premiered on 12 April 1826, by which time Weber was gravely ill. He died on 5 June in the home of London musician Sir George Smart.

The plot of Oberon is based on a poem by Christoph Martin Wieland which was in turn inspired by the 13th-century French chivalric tale Huon de Bordeaux. The fairy king Oberon argues with Titania over whether men or women are more prone to infidelity. They vow not to meet again until they find a faithful couple. Puck tells Oberon about Huon of Bordeaux, a knight in Charlemagne’s court who has been commanded to go to Baghdad to kill the Caliph and marry Reiza, his daughter. After receiving a magic horn from Oberon, Huon rescues Reiza and returns happily with his bride to Charlemagne’s court.

The Overture has remained the most frequently performed part of the opera. Its magical opening unveils a fairyland with the three-note rising call of the elf king’s magic horn, followed by the staccato woodwind figures which appear in the opening chorus ‘Light as fairy foot can fall’. Weber’s ability to create exquisite orchestral textures was admired by his contemporaries, and Debussy later wrote: ‘He was the master of every known means of interpreting the fantastic through music. Even in our own days, few have surpassed him.’

Adapted from a note by Catherine Hocking © 2001

First performance:
12 April 1826, Covent Garden, London.

Most recent WASO performance:
28 & 29 March 2014. Jahja Ling, conductor.

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

Johannes Brahms
(1833-1897)

Concerto for violin, cello and orchestra in A minor, Op.102

Allegro
Andante
Vivace non troppo

Brahms could be difficult, as several friends found to their cost. His relationships with Clara Schumann, Elisabeth von Herzogenberg and others to whom he entrusted his music for criticism were often punctuated by frosty periods, and his friendship with the great violinist Joseph Joachim, first interpreter of the Violin Concerto and
Violin Sonata in G major, was fraught with misunderstandings: in 1884, when Joachim and his wife divorced and Brahms, believing her to have been wronged, took Amalie’s side, the friendship ruptured completely.

In the early 1880s Brahms frequently collaborated with the conductor Hans von Bülow, touring extensively as soloist in both of his Piano Concertos and conducting a number of his orchestral works. But then in 1885 a misunderstanding arose between them and the two were estranged for a year. Partly as a showpiece for Robert Hausmann, the cellist for whom Brahms wrote his sonatas, but largely to heal the rift with Joachim, Brahms composed the Double Concerto in 1887; at the same time, his olive branch to Bülow was the dedication of his Violin Sonata in D minor.

Both, along with a number of other significant late works, were composed during summer vacations on Lake Thun in Switzerland, the Double Concerto dating from 1887. The rift with Joachim was most definitely healed when he and Hausmann played through the piece with the composer at Baden-Baden later that year, in the presence of perhaps the one friend with whom Brahms never completely fell out: Clara Schumann.

It is Brahms’ last orchestral work, and not surprisingly exhibits a number of features of Brahms’ (and indeed many composers’) ‘late style’. Unlike, say, the Violin Concerto, this is a work that underplays its virtuosity; in fact, after that first rehearsal the solo parts were revised, three or so times in the case of the violin part, to make them more, not less, difficult. Joachim and Brahms both had strong views on how that might be achieved, though in a letter to Clara Schumann he admitted, with needless modesty, that he needed the advice of someone ‘better acquainted with fiddles’ than he was. She in turn noted the work was one of ‘reconciliation’, but felt that it lacked ‘warmth and freshness’. In this she was hardly alone, if more polite than one friend who mocked it as a ‘senile production’, and even Joachim took some time to properly love it. More recent scholars have been marginally more generous. It is easy to criticise it for not being something else; it is fairer to see it as an experiment in a new kind of work that lacks grandiose pretentions.

The unusual combination of soloists – Brahms’ own idea – presented some problems of balance which Brahms, naturally, solved: the orchestra provides strong rhetorical statements of major thematic material, but is then deployed in textures of great delicacy when accompanying the soloists. The work’s opening, for instance, offers an arresting orchestral gesture that sets up the typically Brahmsian tension between duple and triple metres, before leaving the stage to a lengthy passage for the cello, a second orchestral flourish (containing a reminiscence of a Viotti concerto which was a favourite of Joachim’s) and then the violin joined by the cello. This alternation between strenuous orchestral textures and the ornate writing for the soloists continues throughout the movement.

The serene beauty of the Andante derives partly from Brahms’ exquisite use of the wind section, often in the simplest of harmonies, to create a cool backdrop for the restrained but still expressive themes, stated first in octaves by the two soloists, that move, via hymnal woodwind writing and antiphony for the violin and cello, to a generous, lyrical climax. The ‘late style’ character here is music that makes its effect with the simplest means, though which remains alive to the possibilities of formal intricacies like counterpoint. The finale is, naturally, an example of Brahms’ ‘gypsy-rondo’ style, which plays on sudden contrast between perky and lyrical, duple and triple metres, and solo writing which features ornate passagework and hefty double-stopped chords. By way of a coda there is an exquisite, slightly slower passage of delicate tracery before the rondo theme brings the piece to a close.

© Gordon Kerry 2014/15

First performance:
18 October 1887, Cologne. Composer conducting.

Most recent WASO performance:
22 August 2015. Asher Fisch, conductor; Pinchas Zukerman, violin and Amanda Forsyth, cello.

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

Richard Strauss
(1864-1949)

Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks – Symphonic Poem, Op.28

Strauss conceived Till Eulenspiegel as a staged work, but after the failure of his opera Guntram he decided he had no gift for that genre. This was something of a rash judgment, and – happily – one that he later revised; but as a tone poem, Till Eulenspiegel is wholly delightful. It tells the story of the legendary peasant folk hero Till Eulenspiegel, from ‘the old rogue’s tale’, who is said to have lived during the 14th century and who became the hero of an expanding pool of anecdotes.

‘Once upon a time there was a roguish jester,’ wrote Strauss in the score; and above the horn call, ‘whose name was Till Eulenspiegel.’ Strauss uses rondo form, and describes Till’s adventures in the episodes. Our hero is unlucky in love; dressed as a priest he ‘oozes unction and morality’.

He commits any number of pranks, but the main theme continues to return, and Till is restored to where he started. He resembles nothing so much as an indestructible cartoon character, always ready for trouble again by the next frame. Finally, our hero’s antics catch up with him. Till is confronted with the full force of the law, and punished in a rather terminal way: ‘There he dangles, the breath leaves his body, the last convulsion and Till’s mortal self is finished.’ A gory ending, but we sense the composer’s delight even in this, as he leaves us, smiling, with Till’s death throes, and an echo of the beginning.

Anna Goldsworthy © 2001

First performance:
5 November 1895, Cologne. Franz Wüllner, conductor.

Most recent WASO performance:
14 & 15 March 2014. Jahja Ling, conductor.

Instrumentation:
piccolo, three flutes, three oboes, cor anglais, piccolo clarinet, two clarinets, bass clarinet, three bassoons and contrabassoon; eight horns, six trumpets, three trombones and tuba; timpani, percussion and strings.

Alexander Scriabin
(1872-1915)

The Poem of Ecstasy (Symphony No.4), Op.54

Beethoven once said that music was a higher revelation than religion or philosophy. Russian composer Scriabin had even higher ambitions for his own music.

Starting out as a writer of mazurkas, nocturnes and preludes, Scriabin intended to take Wagner’s ideals of the Gesamtkunstwerk (the combination of all arts in one giant artform capable of elevating the entire community) to new heights. As biographer Faubion Bowers says of the work Scriabin was working towards when he died: ‘Scriabin thought his supra-musical magnawork Mysterium would be so potent in effect that the world would be destroyed in its final “festival”, not just changed as by Revolution.’

Unfortunately, Scriabin died of septicaemia brought on by an insect bite before he could realise this grandiose goal. In the meantime he had taken his harmonic language to the doorstep of Schoenberg and Bartók, an extraordinary path for someone who had started out in a Chopinesque vein.

The works of Scriabin’s middle and late periods give us a glimpse of the weird and wonderful universe he had seen. He was still composing his Third Symphony (The Divine Poem), when he began The Poem of Ecstasy. Based on his literary effort, the Poème Orgiaque in which Man-god arrives at release through love, sex, creation and
procreation, the score was completed substantially in May 1907, but was no longer a four-movement symphony, rather a one-movement sonata form. The world premiere took place in New York on 10 December 1908.

Scriabin attached considerable importance to the poem, not set to music, but which underlies the Poem of Ecstasy and expressed the Spirit’s great self-assertion, ya es’m or ‘I am’, reached after a gamut of emotions and experiences: ‘the maggot of satiety…the bite of hyenas…the sting of serpent’, burning kisses, love-making and ecstasy.

The Poem of Ecstasy follows the traditions of the one-movement form established by Franz Liszt. The exposition sets out the main themes in music by turns languorous and active, slow and fast. The development is signalled by the assignment of the trumpets’ original ‘I am’ theme to snarling trombones and muted horns. There are searing countermelodies for high violins. A bell-like clangour produced by repeated notes on high trilling woodwinds and horns restores us to the languor of the opening and its subsequent mood and tempo changes for the recapitulation.

The work’s fluctuating moods - the ‘manypetalled folds of caressing melody’ - are minutely described in French, but the form makes most sense in terms of Scriabin’s own dictum: ‘From the greatest delicacy (refinement) via active efficacy (flight) to the greatest grandiosity’. ‘When you listen to Ecstasy,’ said Scriabin no doubt referring to its blazing ending, ‘look straight into the eye of the Sun!’

It’s hard to imagine now how important Scriabin once seemed. But later generations favoured the directions taken by Debussy and Schoenberg. Stravinsky might have established a Scriabin School (The Firebird sounds very much like parts of Ecstasy), but his cantata King of the Stars convinced him that rhythmic innovation was the way forward.

Scriabin was always popular in the former USSR. The Poem of Ecstasy was broadcast as Yuri Gagarin blasted into space. Scriabin also enjoyed a brief revival in the West in the psychedelic 1970s. His harmonic language, a discordant euphony which can be traced back to the methods of Rimsky-Korsakov, is easily suggestive of a heightened state of mind; his orchestration is multi-coloured.

But The Poem of Ecstasy deserves to be heard more often. As Robert Craft once said, in discussing the links between Stravinsky and Scriabin: ‘A comparison of The Poem of Ecstasy with The Firebird reveals a debt far larger than is generally realized, of one of the most popular to one of the least popular of early 20th century masterpieces.’

Gordon Kalton Williams
Symphony Australia © 1999/2009

First performance:
10 December 1908, New York City. Modest Altschuler, conductor.

Most recent WASO performance:
1 & 2 June 2007. Vladimir Verbitsky, conductor.

Instrumentation:
piccolo, three flutes, three oboes, cor anglais, three clarinets, bass clarinet, three bassoons and contrabassoon; eight horns, five trumpets, three trombones and tuba; timpani, percussion, celesta, organ, two harps and strings.