Rachmaninov's Third Piano 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.

Yeol Eum Son
Piano

Poetic elegance, an innate feeling for expressive nuance and the power to project bold, dramatic contrasts are among the arresting attributes of Yeol Eum Son. In high demand as a recitalist, concerto soloist and chamber musician, Yeol Eum has won critical acclaim from artists and audiences for the insights and intelligence of her interpretations. Across the 23/24 season, Yeol Eum collaborates with Deutsche Radio Philharmonie Saarbrücken Kaiserslautern in Germany, goes on tour in South Korea and makes her debut with London Symphony Orchestra, Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra, Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, NAC Orchestra and West Australian Symphony Orchestra. Yeol Eum also returns to Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra and Auckland Philharmonia.

Born in Wonju, South Korea in 1986, Yeol Eum received her first piano lessons at the age of three-and-a-half and has since achieved global acclaim, with her Tchaikovsky Competition performance of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No.21 attracting more than 20 million views on YouTube.

Aaron Wyatt
(b.1982)

The Coming Dawn for orchestra

The Coming Dawn began life as an exploration of the interplay between didgeridoo/yidaki and string quartet (with the added colour of the vibraphone). It was only during the writing process that the title and theme of the work started to slowly emerge from the music. To me, the introduction suggests the stillness of night in the early hours before sunrise, the vibraphone the sparkling of the stars above, the drones in the strings the earth below. With the entry of the didjeridoo, the driving rhythms in the ensemble speak to the ruggedness of the landscape, and to the memory of all who have ventured across it. As minor turns to major (well, technically lydian) the didgeridoo has a chance to solo beneath a slow drawn out melody in the vibraphone, while clear string harmonics begin to sound. The didgeridoo fades, and these harmonics shine out as the very first light of dawn, casting gold, orange, and red hues across the landscape. As the music builds, interjections in the first violin become vaguely reminiscent of bird calls, until the growing presence of the brass and a dramatic key change bring about sunrise itself. Throughout the piece the harmonies have been built firmly around the drone of the didgeridoo, but here they abandon it. The didgeridoo becomes a dissonance, no longer at home in the new key, in a move vaguely reminiscent of the final moments of Strauss’ Also sprach Zarathustra. Just as in the Strauss, it is this semitone dissonance that gets the final word, the tension between the orchestra and the didgeridoo left unresolved.

On a personal note, it has been an immense honour and privilege to be asked by the West Australian Symphony Orchestra to rework the piece for a much larger ensemble. The inclusion of additional strings, brass, and percussion opens up so many more compositional possibilities, and it has been a lot of fun exploring the depth and nuance that these can bring to the work. And having grown up in Perth, they’re an orchestra that I have a very strong connection to. Before ultimately making the pilgrimage east (as far too many of us in the arts do), I spent a lot of time at the back of the viola section as a very regular casual. It’s where I had my first professional, orchestral work, and I will always remember my time there fondly.

First performance:
Original version commissioned by the Canberra Symphony Orchestra for their Red Desert Sand concert at the National Museum of Australia.

First WASO performance:
8 March 2024; Aaron Wyatt, conductor. Richard Walley, didgeridoo.

Instrumentation:
two horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, strings and solo didgeridoo.

Sergei Rachmaninov
(1873-1943)

Piano Concerto No.3 in D minor, Op.30

Allegro ma non tanto
Intermezzo (Adagio) –
Finale (Alla breve)

Having just completed what is now regarded as one of the most famously difficult piano concertos of all time, Rachmaninov’s resort to the use of a ‘dummy’ keyboard as he worked to master it is, perhaps, darkly ironic. But that he did, as he sailed the Atlantic to America for its premiere. His performance with the New York Symphony and Walter Damrosch on 28 November 1909 was greeted enthusiastically, as was a repeat performance at Carnegie Hall the following January with the New York Philharmonic under Gustav Mahler. However, unlike his Second Piano Concerto, which was taken up by other pianists immediately, the popularity of the Third was slow to build. Arguably, it was not until the young Vladimir Horowitz made his European recording debut with the work in 1930 that it found a wider audience.

The concerto was written on the cusp of the so-called ‘modern’ age, the point at which the maximalist excesses of the Romantic were undercut by a preference for sparseness, as is notable in many later 20th-century works. As a composer, Rachmaninov was very much aware of the changing trend, his own turning-point coming directly after his massive, formally designed Second Symphony, completed in 1907. While the inflections common in many performances of the Third Concerto often emphasise its extravagances, many modernising twists are to be found, especially in the work’s unique structure.

An example is the treatment of the first movement’s two main themes, which return at various places in later movements. The famous opening melody – about which commentators often relate Joseph Yasser’s unconvincing attempts to connect it to the composer’s subconscious recollection of a liturgical chant – recurs in the second movement as an impassioned outburst in the violins, and as a jaunty clarinet waltz. In the final movement, the cellos reflect on it briefly as the music winds toward a full restatement of the second theme, which is also reincarnated (incognito) as the underlying motto of the central scherzando section.

Rachmaninov wrote alternate cadenzas for the opening movement, the longer and more extreme being the original of the two. In that reading, the mighty restatement of the main theme in doubleoctave chords clearly marks the point of recapitulation, while in the shorter and lighter second cadenza the recapitulation is less obvious. This tendency to recast by cutting back is a harbinger of the composer’s uncertainty over issues of length and scope, which becomes increasingly prevalent in his later years. This issue similarly underscores the numerous, often disfiguring, cuts that he made in both performance and recording, truncations that were assiduously followed by many subsequent interpreters. These days the concerto is typically played complete, save for a couple of the more adventurous ossias (or alternative passages), which include variant figurations so demanding that they are close to impossible (such as the suggestion of even faster double-octaves in the closing lines).

Rather than using a formally structured theme as the basis for the second movement, as he typically did, a short four-note motif provides the melodic impetus. The writing is some of his most idiosyncratic, and a high level of craft can be discerned in the way each iteration differs in length, allowing successive moments of ever greater impact to be reached. In the Finale, the outer portions of the threefold structure offer pianists some of the most physically challenging passages in the repertoire, an exceptional degree of strength being a prerequisite. The second subject – an ebullient, fastflowing melody – offers only momentary respite.

With the release of the film Shine in 1996, the concerto has witnessed even higher levels of fame (or infamy, depending on one’s view). While its iconic status now seems entrenched, it is perhaps worth noting that Rachmaninov’s success as a pianist was built on ideals that were novel for the time, including understatement, an abhorrence of virtuosity, and faithfulness to the score. A subtle illustration of this perhaps lies in the closing moments, where the music returns – in the style of Grieg and Tchaikovsky’s earlier models – to the lyrical second subject. In this instance, however, Rachmaninov does not allow for wallowing excess; rather, the concerto proceeds to its conclusion in a forthright and headlong manner.

Scott Davie © 2012/2014

First Performance:
28 November 1909. New York Symphony with Walter Damrosch conducting and composer as soloist.

First WASO Performance:
27 & 29 August 1949. Henry Krips, conductor; Witold Małcużyński, soloist

Most Recent WASO Performance:
24-25 August 2018. Asher Fisch, conductor; Cédric Tiberghien, soloist.

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

Richard Strauss
(1864-1949)

Ein Heldenleben (A Hero’s Life), Op.40

Der Held (The Hero)
Des Helden Widersacher (The Hero’s enemies)
Des Helden Gefährtin (The Hero’s companion)
Des Helden Walstatt (The Hero’s deeds of war)
Des Helden Friedenswerke (The Hero’s works of peace)
Des Helden Weltflucht und Vollendung (The Hero’s retirement from the world)

The idea for Ein Heldenleben evidently came to Strauss while he was at work on the symphonic poem Don Quixote. That work, with its theme of the ‘crazy striving after false ideals’, seemed to cry out for a companion piece, one which, as Strauss put it, would embody ‘a more general and free ideal of great and manly heroism’. In 1898 he wrote, slightly facetiously:

Beethoven’s Eroica is so little beloved of our conductors, and is on this account now only rarely performed, that to fulfil a pressing need I am composing a largish tone poem entitled Heldenleben, admittedly without a funeral march, but yet in E flat, with lots of horns, which are always a yardstick of heroism.

The score uses eight horns, to be precise, not to mention five trumpets, two tubas, quadruple woodwind and two harps. But while the hero of Ein Heldenleben must in some respects be identified with Strauss, Norman Del Mar points out that Strauss had ‘too much sense of humour to pompously proclaim himself a hero to the whole world’. In other words, it is Strauss’ life as an artist which furnishes the ‘autobiographical’ elements of Ein Heldenleben. Moreover, the ‘self-portrait’ Strauss draws of himself in the Symphonia domestica is markedly different from that of the Hero introduced in the first section of Ein Heldenleben.

The Hero ‘sings himself’ in a long and, significantly, unaccompanied theme beginning low in the horns and strings and bounding up the arpeggio of E flat through two octaves in its first bar. The theme contains a number of strongly profiled motifs, which are subjected to development representing the ‘primary unfolding of abilities’. After a fully scored climax, a new theme appears, described by Del Mar as the hero’s ‘ultimatum’, which is stated six times and each time answered by silence. Finally, a magisterial chord of the dominant seventh leaves the hero waiting for the world’s response.

In a masterly dramatic stroke, the answer comes from The Hero’s enemies, or critics, in a complex of themes ranging from thin-lipped solos for flute and oboe to the trudging motive for tubas said to represent rhythmically the Munich critic Doktor Döhring. The hero responds with a long and beautiful melody, which serves only to provoke the critics to more hysterical attacks.

Ignoring the critics, the music now turns to The Hero’s companion, the longest and most elaborate movement in the whole About the Music 14 work. The burden of representing the hero’s companion falls largely to the solo violin – reminding us that Pauline Strauss was a singer, whose voice inspired so much of Richard’s work. According to the French writer Romain Rolland, Strauss said, ‘It’s my wife I wanted to portray. She is very complex, very much a woman, a little depraved, something of a flirt, never twice alike, every minute different from what she was the minute before.’ Certainly, Strauss’ portrait is of a complex character, and is not, as Del Mar notes, always flattering.

The love scene is interrupted by a call to battle, which Michael Kennedy takes pains to point out is about the battlefield of the soul, rather than crude militarism. The Hero’s deeds of war are depicted with uncompromising violence, though the progression of the music leaves it in no doubt that the hero will prevail, and the pervasive 3/4 waltz time suggests some ironic distance on the composer’s part. When the tumult and the shouting dies, the music describes The Hero’s works of peace, which Strauss depicts in 30 quotations from eight of his works.

The Hero’s retirement from the world formally recapitulates material and synthesises it. The home key of E flat is re-established, notably in some luminous, quiet writing for eight horns. Memories of battle are dissipated, memories of love are comforting. Strauss (aged 34 when he composed the work) can’t have been thinking of retirement, but convincingly describes a state in which the hero’s soul has been refined by experience. The work originally ended with the ecstatically beautiful passage for horn and violin (again representing the love of his life) which we hear before the final brass apotheosis. Strauss was stung by a friend’s criticism that he could only ever compose quiet endings. In old age he derided the work’s final chords as ‘the Hero’s State Funeral’.

Gordon Kerry © 2002

First performance:
3 March 1899, Frankfurt. Composer conducting.

First WASO performance:
13-14 August 1976; David Measham, conductor.

Most recent WASO performance:
1-2 December 2017; Asher Fisch, conductor.

Instrumentation:
piccolo, three flutes, four oboes (one doubling cor anglais), two clarinets, bass clarinet, E flat clarinet, three bassoons, contrabassoon, eight horns, five trumpets, three trombones, two tubas, timpani, two harps, strings.

Eve McEwen
Associate Principal Horn

When did you know you wanted to be a professional musician?
I have wanted to be a professional musician for as long as I can remember. I originally wanted to be a conductor, before I discovered the joys of playing in an ensemble. I used to sit in music class in primary school conducting along in recorder ensemble, despite the stares I got from my classmates!

What's your go-to exercise for maintaining a beautiful tone on the horn?
I have a myriad of exercises I love on the horn. I particularly love flexibility exercises and will do many different types of flexi every day as part of my routine and warm-up.

What is the best part of being a horn player in an orchestra?
There are so many things I love about being a horn player, but I particularly love the beautiful heroic melodies and solos that are often written for us in the orchestra.

When did you realize that you wanted to become a professional musician?
I was fortunate to find my path relatively early in life. Growing up, I knew I either wanted to be a violinist or a soccer player. In my teens it became clear that I showed more promise as a musician than a soccer player and I've never looked back!

When you're not immersed in music, what hobbies or activities do you enjoy in your free time?
I love reading and cooking. I also love looking after indoor plants and playing with my rescue greyhound, Evie (originally named Eve…by pure coincidence!).

If you could have a dinner party with any person you want, living or historical, who would they be and why? And what would be on the menu?
I would love to have a dinner party with Barry Tuckwell. He was such an influential horn player - he changed the game for Australian horn playing and it would be amazing to pick his brain over a dinner. As for the menu, can’t go wrong with a dumpling night!