Radiant Rachmaninov

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.

Simon Trpčeski
Piano

Simon Trpčeski has been praised as much for his powerful virtuosity and deeply expressive approach as for his charismatic stage presence. Launched onto the international scene twenty years ago as a BBC New-Generation Artist, he has collaborated with over a hundred orchestras on four continents. Simon Trpčeski has worked with conductors including Lorin Maazel, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Marin Alsop, Gustavo Dudamel and Cristian Măcelaru amongst others. Simon Trpčeski’s fruitful collaborations with EMI Classics, Avie Records, Wigmore Hall Live, Onyx Classics, and currently Linn Records have resulted in a broad and award-winning discography which includes repertoire such as Rachmaninov’s complete works for piano and orchestra and Prokofiev’s piano concertos.

Committed to strengthening the cultural image of his native country, Trpčeski’s chamber music project MAKEDONISSIMO weaves into one unique sound world, the Macedonian folk music tradition with highly virtuoso, jazz-influenced riffs and harmonies.

In 2009, Simon Trpčeski received the Presidential Order of Merit for Macedonia and in 2011, he became the first-ever recipient of the title “National Artist of Macedonia”.

Image credit: Benjamin Ealovega

Richard Wagner
(1813-1883)

Lohengrin, Act I: Prelude

Not an overture per se, this prelude is a true poetic introduction to the opera. As Wagner said in his own program note:

Out of the clear blue ether there seems to condense a wonderful yet at first hardly perceptible vision; and out of this there gradually emerges … an angel host bearing … the sacred Grail.

Wagner’s music suggests a long descent. The horns and brass gradually enter and the prelude gathers force, until ‘the Grail is revealed in all its glorious reality’. Then, having reached a climax, the music returns to its quiet origins in the higher strings.

The prelude foreshadows the story. Lohengrin, a Knight of the Grail, arrives in Brabant to champion the falsely accused Elsa. But his assistance is conditional on maintaining anonymity, and after he has succeeded, Elsa brings about Lohengrin’s return to Monsalvat in Spain and her own death by asking his name.

Lohengrin was an important step toward music drama, Wagner’s German brand of grand opera. And wanting to speak more directly to the German people, Wagner wrote his own libretto based on German myth. But Lohengrin did not fully succeed in balancing the musical and dramatic elements. At times, the music forces the drama to move too slowly. Fortunately, Lohengrin is one of Wagner’s most beautifully melodic scores.

But Wagner did not attend the premiere in Weimar in 1850; he was in exile in Switzerland for his part in the Dresden Uprising.

- Gordon Kalton Williams
Symphony Australia © 2003/2015

First performance:
28 August 1850, Weimar.
Franz Liszt, conductor.

First WASO Performance:
14 June 1938.
Ernest J. Roberts, conductor.

First WASO Performance:
4-5 September 2015.
Asher Fisch, conductor.

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

Johannes Brahms
(1833-1897)

Piano Concerto No.1 in D minor, Op.15

Maestoso
Adagio
Rondo (Allegro non troppo)

In 1853, Brahms met his idol, Robert Schumann. Eugenie Schumann (Robert and Clara Schumann’s sixth child) left a vivid description of the 20-year-old’s first visit to their household:

…he brought his compositions with him [presumably the piano sonatas in C, F sharp minor and F minor] and Father thought that as long as he was there, he could play the things…The young man sat down at the piano. He had barely played a few measures when my father interrupted and ran out saying, ‘Please wait a moment, I must call my wife.’

That night, 30 September 1853, Robert Schumann noted simply in his diary: ‘Visit from Brahms, a genius’, and a month later wrote of Brahms, in an article which did much to publicise the budding composer:

Sitting at the piano, he began to disclose wonderful regions to us…he is a player of genius who can make the piano an orchestra of lamenting and loudly jubilant voices. There were sonatas, veiled symphonies rather: songs, the poetry of which could be understood even without words…Should he direct his magic wand where the massive powers of chorus and orchestra may lend him their forces, we can look forward to even more wondrous glimpses of the secret world of spirit…

However, it was to be more than 20 years (1876) before Brahms would produce his Symphony No.1 – before he was confident that his orchestral writing had reached the degree of accomplishment of his piano writing. This concerto was initially an aborted attempt at a symphony derived from a sonata for two pianos, and as so often, the inspiration came (at least in part) from the Schumanns.

Soon after meeting, Brahms and Robert Schumann became firm friends, despite a 23-year gap in their ages. In 1854 Schumann attempted suicide, part of the mental decline which was to see him spend the remaining two years of his life in a mental asylum. Brahms’ distress at the condition of his friend led to the composition of a sonata in D minor for two pianos. Brahms and Clara Schumann played it through. ‘It struck me as quite powerful, quite original,’ she said, ‘conceived with great breadth and more clarity than his earlier things.’ But Brahms was not satisfied, and within a few months, the first movement formed part of a projected symphony in the same key. He had technical problems with the orchestration, despite assistance from a scholarly friend, Julius Grimm, who suggested a solution to the conflict between Brahms’ pianistic and orchestral concepts: a piano concerto.

Brahms later destroyed the duo sonata and the incomplete symphony, but parts of the two works are in the piano concerto. (The Scherzo of the sonata became the chorus ‘Behold, all flesh is as the grass’ in A German Requiem.) After many revisions of the first two movements, and the addition of a Rondo finale, Brahms’ Piano Concerto No.1 was complete in its first version early in 1858. It received a private rehearsal under Joseph Joachim and his Hanover orchestra on 30 March 1858, and a first public performance in Hanover on 22 January 1859.

Part of Brahms’ hesitation in writing a symphony can be traced to the influence of Beethoven. ‘You don’t know what it is like always to hear that giant marching along behind me,’ he once wrote to Hermann Levi. And the opening of this concerto owes more to Beethoven than simply the key of the Ninth Symphony. Brahms’ youthful impetuosity led him to strain the limits of his capacity for self-expression and the first movement is a grandiose expansion of sonata form of Beethovenian proportions.

The opening, with its roaring timpani, has been likened to an image of the young Brahms hurling his theme like a thunderbolt. After culminating in a burst of heavy trills, the music settles down to a series of lyrical episodes, introducing a gentler rocking music. The orchestra swells again with the opening material and then finally, as it subsides, the piano enters, setting up the other emotional extremity within which this movement will be played out.
Brahms’ writing for piano is robust and athletic. More significant is the consistent density of the texture, a vestige perhaps of the two equal partners for which this music was originally conceived.

With Schumann’s collapse, Brahms moved in with Clara, took charge of the family’s financial affairs, and helped with the children. Thus began the most complicated emotional period of his life, for Brahms fell in love with his idol’s wife, 13 years his senior. How close their relationship became we cannot now determine, but there is no doubt that the second movement of this concerto, the Adagio, is a declaration of his love. ‘I am painting a lovely portrait of you,’ he wrote to Clara during the composition of this movement. ‘It is to be the Adagio.’

The top of the manuscript of this movement originally bore the inscription Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini (Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord). It is thought that this refers to Clara, as Brahms sometimes called Robert Schumann ‘Mynherr Domine’, and in the opening moments, Brahms, reputed to be the most absolute of musicians, refers to the song Nimm sie hin denn, diese Lieder (Take them then, beloved, these songs I sang to you) from Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte.

The Adagio opens into the Rondo finale in a manner clearly derived from Beethoven’s C minor Piano Concerto (No.3). The seriousness of Brahms’ artistic intentions can be gauged by the finale. Here is an almost typically 19th-century showy ending, but the musical material, though carried along at speed, is nearly of equal weight to that of the first movement.

Brahms is often thought of as the most Classical of Romantic-era composers. ‘Passions are not natural to mankind, they are always exceptions or excrescences,’ he wrote to Clara in October 1857, perhaps mindful that their relationship would remain platonic. But what Robert Schumann’s music taught Brahms was Romantic in its own way – an intimate relationship among themes, a profound unity of inner relations revealing an ideal Hoffmannesque ‘kingdom of tones’ beyond. In this work, Brahms – who was yet to sign the declaration dissociating himself from Liszt and the New German School, which allowed into music narrative devices from the other arts – expresses his emotions as openly as he ever would again.

Gordon Kerry © 2008

First performance:
22 January 1859, Hanover. Johannes Brahms, soloist. Joseph Joachim, conductor.

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.