Dvořák’s Cello Concerto

Asher Fisch
Conductor

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. Asher is now the longest serving Principal Conductor of the West Australian Symphony Orchestra (WASO), commencing his tenure in 2014. 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, Asher 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 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.

In addition to his concerts with WASO, Asher’s 2024 season includes Aribert Reimann’s Lear at the Teatro Real de Madrid, Carmen at the Wiener Staatsoper, and Dialogues des Carmélites at the Israeli Opera. Guest engagements with orchestras include a return to the Queensland Symphony in Brisbane. His recent seasons featured Lohengrin and La forza del destino at the Teatro Comunale di Bologna, Cavalleria Rusticana & Pagliacci at the Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre and concerts with the Düsseldorfer Symphoniker, Queensland Symphony, Sydney Symphony, and Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra.

Asher’s award-winning recordings include Bruckner’s Symphony No.8, Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde and tenor Stuart Skelton’s first solo album “Shining Knight” - all recorded with WASO - and Ravel’s L’heure espagnole with the Munich Radio Orchestra. In 2016, the complete Brahms symphonies with Asher Fisch and WASO were released on ABC Classic to great acclaim. His recording of Wagner’s Ring Cycle with the Seattle Opera was released in 2014. His first Ring Cycle recording, with the State Opera of South Australia, won ten Helpmann Awards, including best opera and best music direction. Asher Fisch is an accomplished pianist and has released a solo recording of Wagner piano transcriptions for the Melba label.

Alban Gerhardt
Cello

Having launched his career with Berliner Philharmoniker and Semyon Bychkov in 1991, Alban Gerhardt has since gained recognition as one of the world’s most versatile cellists, highly regarded for his technical mastery, profound musicality, and insatiable artistic curiosity.

Notable orchestral collaborators include Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, all the British and German radio orchestras, Berliner Philharmoniker, Tonhalle- Orchester Zürich, Orchestre National de France, Orquesta Nacional de España as well as The Cleveland Orchestra, and Philadelphia, Boston and Chicago symphony orchestras.

Alongside an extensive repertoire comprising all the core concertos, Gerhardt is also the go-to soloist for contemporary composers. Highlights in the 2023/24 season include Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin with Marin Alsop, Gürzenich-Orchester Köln with Susanna Mälkki, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra with Andrew Manze, and Sydney Symphony Orchestra with Simone Young.

A prolific recording artist, Gerhardt has received several awards for his recordings including Reger: Cello Sonatas with Markus Becker under Hyperion, Unsuk Chin’s Cello Concerto with Myung-Whun Chung and Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra under Deutsche Grammophon, and the Shostakovich: Cello Concertos with WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln and Jukka-Pekka Saraste under Hyperion.

Gerhardt is passionate about sharing his discoveries with audiences far beyond the traditional concert hall, undertaking outreach projects with young people across Europe and the US.

Alban Gerhardt plays a Matteo Goffriller cello dating from 1710.

Bedřich Smetana
(1824-1884)

The Bartered Bride: Overture

In this breathless overture, Smetana encapsulates the vitality and bustle, as well as the rustic charm, of a Czech village in festive mood. This was the first time Czech village life had been portrayed believably in opera. Although premiered inauspiciously in the shadow of a looming (though in the event, short) war with Bismarck’s Prussia, The Bartered Bride survived the fiasco of its truncated opening season in the oppressive midsummer heat of 1866 to win the undying affection of Czech people (and, subsequently, audiences throughout the world).

Smetana’s comedy is peopled with characters his audiences would recognise and empathise with, individuals experiencing the deep human emotions of hope and fear, venality and cunning, confusion and despair and, above all, unquenchable young love. In the ‘all’s fair’ context of love and war, not even a dubious device by which the happy outcome turns on a piece of shameless deception can arouse disquiet. Thus not only the bride is won, but a questionable cash bonus as well. (The opera is literally ‘The Sold Bride’, not ‘bartered’.)

The overture essentially sets the scene of festivity on the village green. The three main motifs (bustling, suspenseful string figures in the opening, a polkalike subject which foreshadows the brilliant national dances to come, and a winsome, contrasting oboe melody) will all be heard again at the climax of the second act as the bridal-sale contract is signed before the outraged village-folk as indignant witnesses.

Adapted from an annotation by Anthony Cane © 2005

First performance:
30 May 1866, Prague. Composer conducting.

First WASO performance:
24-25 July 2009. Jakub Hrůša, conductor

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

Antonín Dvořák
(1841-1904)

Cello Concerto in B minor, Op.104

Allegro
Adagio ma non troppo
Allegro moderato

Brahms was impressed. ‘If only I’d known,’ he said, ‘that one could write a cello concerto like that, I’d have written one long ago!’ And he wasn’t just being polite. Brahms had recognised Dvořák’s talents early on, ensuring that the young composer received the Austrian State Stipendium for five years, and persuading his own publisher, Simrock of Berlin, to publish Dvořák’s music.

But Brahms’ admiration aside, the composition of what Dvořák scholar John Clapham has called simply ‘the greatest of all cello concertos’ was no easy matter. In fact, it was his second attempt at the medium – the first, in A major, was composed in 1865 (and rediscovered in 1929), but appears only to have been written out in a cello and piano score. That Dvořák left the work unorchestrated suggests that he was dissatisfied with this first effort. Despite the urgings of his friend, the cellist Hanuš Wihan, Dvořák thought no more about writing such a piece until many years later.

In 1894 Dvořák was living in New York, having accepted the invitation of Jeannette Meyer Thurber to head the National Conservatory of Music that she had founded there in 1885. In March 1894, Dvořák attended a performance by Victor Herbert of his Second Cello Concerto. The Irish-born American composer and cellist is now best remembered for shows like Naughty Marietta and Babes in Toyland, but his concerto, modelled on Saint-Saëns’ First, made a huge impact on Dvořák, who re-examined the idea of such a work for Wihan. The concerto was sketched between 8 November 1894 and New Year’s Day, and Dvořák completed the full score early in February.

Much to Dvořák’s annoyance, the first performance of the concerto was not given by its dedicatee, Wihan. The London Philharmonic Society, who premiered it at the Queen’s Hall in March 1896, mistakenly believed Wihan to be unavailable, and engaged Leo Stern. Despite Dvořák’s embarrassment, Stern must have delivered the goods, as Dvořák engaged him for the subsequent New York, Prague and Vienna premieres of the work. Wihan did, however, perform the work often, and insisted on making some ‘improvements’ to Dvořák’s score so that the cello part would be more virtuosic. Wihan also insisted on interpolating a cadenza in the third movement, which the composer vehemently opposed. Simrock was on the point of publishing the work with Wihan’s amendments, and only a stiff letter from Dvořák persuaded the publisher to leave out the cadenza.

Despite being an ‘American’ work, the concerto is much more a reflection of Dvořák’s nostalgia for his native Bohemia, and perhaps for the composer’s father who died in 1894. The work is full of some of Dvořák’s most inspired moments, such as the heroic first theme in the first movement, and the complementary melody for horn which adds immeasurably to its Romantic ambience.

The Bohemian connection became even stronger and more personal when Dvořák, working on the piece in December 1894, heard that his sisterin- law Josefina (with whom he had been in love during their youth) was seriously, perhaps mortally ill. Dvořák was sketching the slow movement at the time. The outer sections of this movement are calm and serene, but Dvořák expresses his distress in an impassioned gesture that ushers in an emotionally unstable central section in G minor, based on his song Kéž duch můj sám (Leave me alone) which was one of Josefina’s favourites.

Josefina died in the spring of 1895, and Dvořák, by this time back in Bohemia, made significant alterations to the concluding coda of the third movement, adding some 60 bars of music. The movement begins almost ominously with contrasting lyrical writing for the soloist. Dvořák’s additions to the movement, and his determination not to diffuse its emotional power with a cadenza, allowed him, as scholar Robert Battey notes, to revisit ‘not only the first movement’s main theme, but also a hidden reference to Josefina’s song in the slow movement. Thus, the concerto becomes something of a shrine, or memorial.’

Gordon Kerry
Symphony Australia © 2004

First performance: 19 March 1896, London. Composer conducting, Leo Stern as soloist.

First WASO performance: 10-11 July 1964. John Farnsworth Hall, conductor; Edmund Kurtz, soloist.

Most recent WASO performance: 13-14 July 2018. Joshua Weilerstein, conductor; Pablo Ferrández, soloist.

Instrumentation: two flutes (one doubling piccolo), two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, three horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, triangle, strings.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
(1840-1893)

Symphony No.4 in F minor, Op.36

Andante sostenuto – Moderato con anima
– Moderato assai, quasi Andante – Allegro
vivo
Andantino in modo di canzona
Scherzo (Pizzicato ostinato) – Allegro
Finale (Allegro con fuoco)

‘The Introduction is the kernel of the whole symphony, without question its main idea. This is Fate, the force of destiny…’ This could be a description of the beginning of Beethoven’s Fifth. But the words are Tchaikovsky’s and they describe the strident horn fanfares of his Fourth Symphony.

Tchaikovsky’s patron, Nadezhda von Meck, heard in the symphony a profound emotional drama. After the premiere in 1878 she asked him whether the symphony had a definite program, a literary underpinning. Tchaikovsky had told others that the symphony’s drama couldn’t be formulated in words, but for von Meck, who paid his bills, he went to the trouble of finding those words..

…in truth, it is a hard question to answer…In our symphony there is a program (that is, the possibility of explaining in words what it seeks to express)…Of course, I can do this here only in general terms.
The Introduction is the kernel of the whole symphony, without question its main idea. This is Fate, the force of destiny, which ever prevents our pursuit of happiness from reaching its goal…It is invincible, inescapable. One can only resign oneself and lament fruitlessly. This disconsolate and despairing feeling grows ever stronger and more intense. Would it not be better to turn away from reality and immerse oneself in dreams?

Tchaikovsky continues, identifying musical ideas representing tender dreams and fervent hope, then a climax suggesting the possibility of happiness, before the Fate theme awakens us from the dreams…

And thus, all life is the ceaseless alternation of bitter reality with evanescent visions and dreams of happiness…There is no refuge. We are buffeted about by this sea until it seizes us and pulls us down to the bottom. There you have roughly the program of the first movement.

All this matches the emotional character of the first movement – the music’s ‘profound, terrifying despair’ – and if we allow for Tchaikovsky’s personal turmoil at the time (he’d emerged from an ill-advised marriage) then it could be given an autobiographical interpretation. More striking, though, is Tchaikovsky’s handling of his two principal ideas: Fate and ‘self’. Fate is the fanfare (actually a polonaise, writes Richard Taruskin); ‘self’ is the first real melody – a glorious waltz.

These two ideas collide in the music. Copying a dramatic strategy from Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Tchaikovsky superimposes his dances, matching three bars of waltz time to one bar of the slower, aristocratic polonaise (also in three). Then, in the coda, we hear the ‘complete subjection of self to Fate’ and the waltz returns one last time, stretched to match the pulse of the polonaise – hardly a waltz at all.

The effect of this collision is one of music – and a composer – torn between extremes. Tchaikovsky’s instinct was for lyrical outpourings (his waltz), but he understood that to be a symphonist in 1878 meant observing the symphonic conventions established by Beethoven. The Fate fanfare gave him a motto he could manipulate.

Tchaikovsky’s student, Sergei Taneyev, observed that the ‘disproportionately long’ first movement gave ‘the appearance of a symphonic poem to which three movements have been appended fortuitously to make up a symphony’. Perhaps Tchaikovsky agreed: after the wealth of detail for the first movement, his descriptive program peters out.

The second movement is summed up as an expression of ‘the melancholy feeling that arises in the evening as you sit alone, worn out from your labours’. The Scherzo appears to contain no definite feelings at all: ‘One’s mind is a blank, and the imagination has free rein.’ But the Scherzo is one of the most effective parts of the symphony – the relentless plucking of pizzicato strings combining with brilliant writing for woodwinds and brass, in particular the scampering piccolo.

In the Finale, Tchaikovsky chooses a Russian folk song, ‘The Birch Tree’, as the theme for a set of variations. He gives the apparently cheerful scenario of holiday festivities a depressing cast: ‘If you can find no impulse for joy within yourself, look at others…Never say that all the world is sad. You have only yourself to blame…Why not rejoice through the joys of others?’ It’s as if we are to hear the finale as festivity – but second hand. If this isn’t resignation to Fate, nothing is.

Yvonne Frindle © 2009/2013

First performance:
22 February 1878, Moscow, Nikolay Rubinstein conducting.

First WASO performance:
4 May 1940. Georg Schnéevoigt, conductor.

Most recent WASO performance:
20-21 November 2020. Guy Noble, conductor.

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

Nik Babic
Viola

When did you realize that you wanted to become a professional musician?
I think I had it on the radar ever since I started playing music. As I made little achievements along the way it became more of a reality and so I naturally progressed into it. I gave myself five years of auditioning at the end of which time, if unsuccessful, I would explore other career paths. Two years into it I got the WASO job so didn’t have to think too hard.

What is the best thing about being a musician in WASO?
Our work is quite diverse in terms of the styles of music we get to perform and venues where we get to work. Unlike most other orchestras around the country, we regularly perform with the opera and ballet companies so the repertoire and the way we play is guided by the role of the orchestra in these productions. I love playing in the pit and being part of a larger whole during these seasons. I also love travelling around the state as part of our regional touring.

What qualities are most important in order to play the viola?
There are no particular qualities compared to other musicians, however there is one difference for violas: as the violas are in the geographical centre of the orchestra we don’t have to think too much about playing ahead of the beat. Some of the instruments at the very back have to do that most of the time in order to compensate for the distance. We get to enjoy a true hi-fi surround sound all the time!

Do you get nervous before a performance? I
I used to get very nervous but these days not as much. I think that most musicians go through varying degrees of nervousness in the lead up to a performance. It all stems from our tendency to be perfectionists when it comes to our own playing and the desire to not let the orchestra as a group down.

What’s your favourite thing about WA?
I absolutely love the WA landscape and the sheer vastness of it. For someone who spent most of his life in the urban sprawls in Europe and the US these open spaces and the emptiness of it all still feels just amazing.