Radiant Rachmaninov - Morning
MORNING SYMPHONY SERIES
Thursday 23 November 2023, 11.00am
Perth Concert Hall
West Australian Symphony Orchestra respectfully acknowledges the Traditional Custodians and Elders of Country throughout Western Australia, and the Whadjuk Noongar people on whose lands we work and share music.
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Radiant Rachmaninov - Morning
Richard WAGNER Lohengrin, Act I: Prelude (9 mins)
Sergei RACHMANINOV Symphonic Dances (35 mins)
Non Allegro
Andante con moto (Tempo di valse)
Lento assai – Allegro vivace
Asher Fisch conductor
Simon Trpčeski piano
Asher Fisch appears courtesy of Wesfarmers Arts.
Wesfarmers Arts Pre-concert Talk
Find out more about the music in the concert with this week’s speaker, Cecilia Sun. The Pre-concert Talk will take place at 9.40am in the Main Auditorium.
Listen to WASO
This performance is recorded for broadcast on ABC Classic. For further details visit abc.net.au/classic
WASO On Stage
About the Artist
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.
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About the Music
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.
Glossary
Libretto – literally, a ‘little book’: the words of an opera or oratorio.
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About the Music
Sergei Rachmaninov
(1873-1943)
Symphonic Dances, Op.45
Non AllegroAndante con moto (Tempo di valse)
Lento assai – Allegro vivace
After Rachmaninov left Russia in 1917, the seizure of his Russian income by the Soviet government meant he had to earn a living as a performing musician, and so he set about establishing his career as a concert pianist. Although famous for interpreting his own music, he had never been called upon to perform music by other composers in public, and now, at the age of 44, he began building up a soloist’s repertoire. This left little time for composition, and he wrote no original work for another nine years. Then the urge to compose began to reassert itself. A fitful procession of ‘Indian summer’ pieces emerged between 1926 and 1940, many of which are now regarded as among his finest compositions. But at the time most of these works met with indifference from audiences and hostility from critics. His success as a pianist far outstripped that of his music.
Among the first fruits of his period in the West were the Fourth Piano Concerto (1926) and the Variations on a theme of Corelli (1931). Neither was successful. The public and critical acclaim for his Rhapsody on a theme of Paganini (1934) gave him the confidence to write his Third Symphony (1936), to which, in the composer’s words, ‘audiences and critics responded sourly’. This indifference to his music sapped his confidence once again.
The orchestral style Rachmaninov cultivated in his later years was marked by great clarity of texture, a freer and more independent approach to brass and woodwind writing, and a tendency to express ideas more concisely than in his earlier large-scale pieces. Harmonically and rhythmically, his music of the 1930s bears the influence of Prokofiev and Stravinsky, but very much on Rachmaninov’s own terms. His melodies still move, on the whole, in stepwise fashion, in the manner of Russian Orthodox chant, and although he clothes his melodies in lighter textures, he is not ashamed to write tunes that could be called ‘vintage Rachmaninov’.
The result was too ‘modern’ and lean-sounding for audiences who wanted him to keep rewriting the Second Piano Concerto, and too conservative for critics, whose twin gods were Stravinsky and Schoenberg. Collectively, the Symphonic Dances represent perhaps the richest results of Rachmaninov’s new approach to the orchestra. They were also his last original composition.
The idea of a score for a programmatic ballet had been at the back of Rachmaninov’s mind since 1915, and when Michel Fokine successfully choreographed the Paganini Rhapsody in 1939 the opportunity presented itself again. He wrote the Dances the following year, giving the three movements the titles Midday, Twilight and Midnight respectively. At this point the work was called Fantastic Dances. Fokine was enthusiastic about the music but non-committal about its balletic possibilities. His death a short time later cooled Rachmaninov’s interest in the ballet idea. He deleted his descriptive titles, substituted the word ‘Symphonic’ for ‘Fantastic’, and dedicated the triptych to his favourite orchestra, the Philadelphia, and its chief conductor Eugene Ormandy.
It is a work full of enigmas which Rachmaninov, surely one of the most secretive of composers, does nothing to clarify. In the coda of the first movement, for example, there is a transformation from minor to major of a prominent theme from his first symphony, which at that time Rachmaninov thought he had destroyed (it was reconstructed from orchestral parts after his death). The premiere of that work in 1897 had been such a fiasco that Rachmaninov could not compose at all for another three years. The reference in this new piece had a meaning that was entirely private.
There is also the curious paradox that the word ‘dance’, with its suggestion of life-enhancing, joyous activity, is here put at the service of a work that is essentially concerned – for all its vigour and sinew – with endings, with a chromaticism that darkens the colour of every musical step. The sense of foreboding and finality is particularly strong in the second movement, with its evocations of a spectral ballroom, and in the bell-tolling and chant-intoning that pervade the finale. Here the extensive use of the Dies irae (Day of Wrath) theme from the Mass for the Dead (a regular source for Rachmaninov) and the curious inscription ‘Alliluya’, written in the score above the last motif in the work to be derived from Orthodox chant, suggest the most final of endings mingled with a sense of thanksgiving.
Abridged from a note by Phillip Sametz © 1999
First performance:
3 January 1941; The Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by
Eugene Ormandy.
First WASO performance:
5-6 May 1989; Albert Rosen, conductor.
Most recent WASO performance:
12-13 October 2018; Ludovic Morlot, conductor.
Instrumentation:
two flutes and piccolo, two oboes and cor anglais, two clarinets and bass clarinet, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, alto saxophone, timpani, percussion, harp, piano and strings.
Glossary
Russian Orthodox chant – a type of plainchant, the traditional music of the Russian Orthodox Church. It is unaccompanied singing of a unison melody with no sense of any regular rhythm or pattern of strong and weak beats.
Programmatic – describes music which is inspired by and purports to express a non-musical idea, such as a story or a particular scene.
Coda – a concluding section added to the basic structure of a piece or movement to emphasise the sense of finality.
Chromatic/chromaticism – use of notes that are not part of the key.
Motif – a short, distinctive melodic or rhythmic figure, often part of or derived from a theme.
150 Years of Rachmaninov
