Brahms' Triumph

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 eras. 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 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.

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.

Asher Fisch appears courtesy of Wesfarmers Arts.

Allan Meyer
WASO Principal Clarinet

Allan Meyer has been Principal Clarinet with the West Australian Symphony Orchestra (WASO) since 1990. His distinguished career has seen him perform in many parts of Australia, as well as in the USA. He has been guest Principal Clarinet with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and the Springfield Symphony Orchestra, USA.

Allan was born in Perth and studied with WASO’s former Principal Clarinet, Jack Harrison. A Masters graduate of the University of Western Australia (UWA), he completed post-graduate studies in London with John McCaw, Antony Pay and Jack Brymer.

After 7 years with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, Allan returned to Perth as Principal Clarinet of WASO. He has appeared as soloist in the Masters and Classics Series, Mostly Mozart Series, Symphony Under the Stars, and with the WASO Chamber Players. Allan teaches at the Conservatorium of Music at UWA, and he has also performed and taught at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA.

Allan has enjoyed performing the Mozart Concerto many times with WASO. He has also premiered a number of works including the Australian premiere of Richard Mills’ Concerto for Clarinet and Violin and world premieres of Andrew Shultz’s Maali, James Ledger’s Clarinet Quintet, and Blackwood by Iain Grandage and Kevin Gillam. Blackwood was commissioned by Jody Harrison and especially written for Allan, Sara Macliver and Graeme Gilling.

Allan Meyer’s Chair is supported by Leanne & Sam Walsh AO through the Duet program.

Johannes Brahms
(1833-1897)

Academic Festival Overture, Op.80 Brahms had never been a formally enrolled university student, but in 1853 he’d had a rattling good time leading a student-style existence in Göttingen, singing drinking songs with the local student population. In 1880, after receiving an honorary doctorate from the University of Breslau, the by-now-famous composer responded with a concert overture in honour of the occasion. But rather than writing an ‘academic’ work, Brahms set out to complete a jovial piece based on the convivial aspects of student life which he had known firsthand.

Brahms took four of his favourite student drinking songs and worked them into a free sonata structure using the largest and most percussion-dominated orchestra that he had ever employed. He noted that it was ‘a very boisterous potpourri of student songs à la Suppé’ – a reference to Suppé’s opera Flotte Bursch, which is constructed in the same way.

The four songs on which the work is based are Wir hatten gebauet ein stattliches Haus (We had built a stately house), which is introduced in chorale-like fashion by the brass; Der Landesvater (The father of our country), heard first on the second violins; the undergraduate initiation song Was kommt dort von der Hoh, introduced by bassoons over pizzicato figures in the violas and cellos; and finally, a full orchestral version of Gaudeamus igitur, a medieval student song that Suppé had also used in Flotte Bursch. The fun starts right at the beginning, with a pompously solemn opening, rapidly giving way to the high spirits which characterise the piece as a whole.

Abridged from a note by Martin Buzacott © Symphony Australia

First performance:
4 January 1881, Breslau, composer conducting.

First WASO performance:
6 July 1951. Rudolf Pekárek, conductor.

Most recent WASO performance:
4-5 August 2017. Simone Young AM, conductor.

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

Johannes Brahms
(1833-1897)

Symphony No.4 in E minor, Op.98
Allegro non troppo
Andante moderato
Allegro giocoso
Allegro energico e passionato

In 1885 Brahms, as was his wont, convened a group of trusted friends to listen to a play-through of the Fourth Symphony, with the composer and his friend Ignaz Brüll at the piano. Feedback from knowledgeable people had been invaluable throughout his career, and on this occasion the listeners included the conductor Hans Richter and the critic Eduard Hanslick. But this time the response was a baffled silence. Even Hanslick, Brahms’ greatest supporter in print, tried to joke that he felt like he had been ‘beaten up by two intelligent people’ at the end of the first movement. Later, after the work’s politely-received Viennese premiere, a less well-disposed wit composed a verse to the theme of the first movement to the effect that Brahms had run out of ideas.

The Third Symphony had, of course, enjoyed an unqualified success and it says much for Brahms’ artistic integrity that he was prepared to take a quite different approach in the new work; that the Fourth was written over not one but two summers suggests that Brahms had to work hard at it.

So, what baffled the listeners in the first movement? In fact the ‘run out of ideas’ guy was wrong, but nevertheless onto something, in that a large chunk of Brahms’ first theme consists of practically no material: two chains of thirds (and sixths, their inversion) are sounded in a rhythm that consists entirely of a repeated short-long pattern.

Eventually a more elaborate motif is sounded, but then immediately repeated in sequence. The thirds provide the basis for a fanfare-like transition into the second theme, and here again Brahms goes against convention with a melody that is not, as expected, ‘lyrical’ but is much more assertive, sounded in the orchestra’s tenor register, and again based on sequences of a repeated rhythmic cell (long, long, short, short, short). Fragmentary patterns of thirds provide the accompaniment.

All of which is to say that Brahms was writing in, to the Viennese, a disturbingly abstract and ‘modern’ way. Haydn, of course, and Beethoven – especially in the Fifth Symphony – had worked in just this way, and it is no accident that such rigorous design attracted the approval of Schoenberg in his 1933 lecture, Brahms the Progressive. But it put Brahms out of step with current musical fashion in Vienna.

The piece is frequently intensely contrapuntal (and thus requires a ‘classical’ orchestra), reflecting Brahms’ lifelong love of the Baroque, but there are profoundly poetic moments. The recapitulation of the first movement’s main theme should, by convention, be a rhetorically powerful moment of arrival; Brahms instead dwells on a distant but radiant C major chord and then, radically, continues to develop his themes.

The second movement is in what has sometimes been called Brahms’ ‘bardic’ manner. The young Richard Strauss, who regarded the ‘gigantic work’ as ‘new and original in its greatness of conception and invention, its genius in treatment of form’, captured the slow movement’s essence in his image of a ‘funeral procession moving across moonlit heights’.

This movement, which relies heavily on mysterious wind scoring and the occasional archaic inflections of the Phrygian mode, could not offer a greater contrast to the scherzo, with what Karl Geiringer calls its ‘sturdy gaiety’. In two, rather than three, beats to a bar, it has a rustic air, but its most curious feature is the way in which Brahms, again creating music out of nothing, offers a serious of monolithic chords, octaves apart, that interrupt the rhythmic drive of the movement towards its end. These chords, however, also pave the way for the finale, in which Brahms abandons any vestige of classical precedent, instead using the Baroque form of the passacaglia, in which a repeated harmonic pattern, or ground, serves as a vehicle for variations. Brahms’ ground is a series of rhythmically equal chords (adumbrated at the end of the scherzo) over which he elaborates a movement unlike anything heard in symphonic music before.

In 1886, Vienna’s response was tepid, partly as Hans Richter’s rehearsals were inadequate. But by then the work had enjoyed triumphant success in 14 German and Dutch cities under Hans von Bülow. Vienna finally embraced it, and the mortally ill Brahms, at the last concert the composer was able attend before his death in 1897.

© Gordon Kerry 2015

First performance:
25 October 1885, Meiningen.

First WASO performance:
14 July 1951; Rudolf Pekárek, conductor.

Most recent WASO performance:
27/29 November 2020; Peter Moore, conductor.

Instrumentation:
two flutes (second doubling piccolo), two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, percussion, strings.

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