Bruch's Violin Concerto

Asher Fisch
Principal Conductor & Artistic Adviser

Asher Fisch is a renowned conductor celebrated for his interpretative mastery of the core German and Italian repertoire of the Romantic and post-Romantic eras. Equally accomplished in both the operatic and symphonic realms, his repertoire spans from Haydn to contemporary works by living composers. Since 2014, he has been the Principal Conductor & Artistic Adviser of the West Australian Symphony Orchestra (WASO), making him the orchestra’s longest-serving Principal Conductor. His previous positions 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 career as Daniel Barenboim’s assistant and Kappellmeister at the Berlin Staatsoper. He has since conducted at major opera houses worldwide, including the Metropolitan Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Vienna Staatsoper, Teatro alla Scala, Royal Opera House Covent Garden, and Semperoper Dresden. His symphonic engagements have included leading prestigious orchestras such as the Berlin Philharmonic, Munich Philharmonic, London Symphony Orchestra, Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, and Orchestre National de France, as well as top American orchestras in Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, New York, and Philadelphia.

In 2023, Asher Fisch was appointed Music Director of the Tiroler Festspiele in Erl, Austria, where he collaborates with the festival’s General Manager, celebrated tenor Jonas Kaufmann. Their inaugural season premiered in December 2024. The festival, held three times annually, features a diverse program of orchestral and operatic performances, chamber music, and Lied. Known for its dedication to the works of Richard Wagner, the Tiroler Festspiele will present Parsifal during Easter 2025, with Fisch conducting and Kaufmann in the title role. Each year will see the addition of a new Wagner opera production.

In 2025, Fisch’s engagements include La Bohème, Wagner’s Parsifal, and three Verdi operas at the Tiroler Festspiele, Verdi’s Il Trovatore with the West Australian Opera, Britten’s War Requiem in Düsseldorf, among other performances. Recent highlights include Reimann’s Lear at Teatro Real de Madrid, Carmen at the Vienna Staatsoper, and Dialogues des Carmélites at the Israeli Opera.

Fisch’s award-winning discography includes Bruckner’s Symphony No.8, Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, and tenor Stuart Skelton’s debut solo album Shining Knight, all recorded with WASO. His critically acclaimed releases also feature Ravel’s L’Heure Espagnole with the Munich Radio Orchestra and the complete Brahms symphonies with WASO, released on ABC Classic. His two recordings of Wagner’s Ring cycle — with the Seattle Opera and the State Opera of South Australia — garnered widespread acclaim, with the latter winning ten Helpmann Awards, including Best Opera and Best Music Direction.

In addition to his conducting achievements, Fisch is an accomplished pianist. His solo recording of Wagner piano transcriptions for the Melba label showcases his versatility and artistry.

Asher Fisch appears courtesy of Wesfarmers Arts.

Simone Lamsma
Violin

Hailed for her briliant and intense playing, Dutch violinist Simone Lamsma is respected by critics, peers and audiences as one of classical music’s most striking and captivating musical personalities.

She has been the guest of many major orchestras such as the New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, London Philharmonic Orchestra, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Konzerthaus Orchester Berlin, Rundfunk Sinfonieorchester Berlin, Wiener Symphoniker, Helsinki Philharmonic, Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale della Rai, Oslo Philharmonic, Finnish Radio Symphony, Yomiuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra, Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra, Hong Kong Philharmonic and Sydney Symphony Orchestra.

She has played under such eminent conductors as Jaap van Zweden, Antonio Pappano, Paavo Järvi, Gianandrea Noseda, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Vladimir Jurowski, Rafael Payare, Louis Langrée, Gustavo Gimeno, Karina Canellakis, Jonathon Heyward, Stanislav Kochanovsky, Kazuki Yamada, Tarmo Peltokoski, Marc Albrecht, Stéphane Denève, Vasily Petrenko, Simone Young, Juraj Valčuha, John Storgårds, Edward Gardner, Kent Nagano, Jukka-Pekka Saraste and Petr Popelka.

In the 2024/25 season, Simone is Artist in Residence for the Dutch Radio Avrotros series and will, in this context, premiere a work by leading Dutch composer Joey Roukens at the Tivoli Vredenbrug Utrecht and the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, with the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic and Markus Stenz.

In 2022, her most recent recording was released to great acclaim, featuring late works by Rautavaara, including a world premiere, with the Malmö Symphony and Robert Trevino for the Ondine label. Other recordings include Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto and Gubaidulina’s In tempus praesens with the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic, under James Gaffigan and Reinbert de Leeuw on Challenge Classics.

In 2019, Simone was made a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Music in London, an honour limited to 300 former Academy students, and awarded to those musicians who have distinguished themselves within the profession.

Richard Strauss
(1864-1949)

Macbeth, Op.23 TrV 163

In the early 19th century, the Romantic movement saw a renewed interest in the work of Shakespeare in continental Europe. Among the leading German writers of the movement was August Wilhelm Schlegel, who set to work on performable verse translations of Shakespeare. The young Mendelssohn, who had a family connection with the Schlegels, was of course fascinated by A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and as the century wore on artists across Europe continued to be drawn to those plays which touched on Romantic staples like ‘Gothic’ settings and supernatural events; composers as diverse as Berlioz, Thomas, and Verdi made Shakespearean operas, while Liszt embodied Hamlet in a symphonic poem.

In 1887, the young Richard Straus (a recent convert to the music of Liszt and Wagner) set to work on his first official tone-poem, Macbeth. For various reasons, however, he put the finished work in a drawer while he worked on Tod und Verklärung and Don Juan, so that Macbeth only received its first performance after the two other works. Strauss was dissatisfied with the piece – having enjoyed the luxury of having the Meiningen Orchestra run through it for his benefit four times one afternoon – and, after its official premiere in Weimar in 1890, revised it heavily. The final version was given its premiere in Berlin in 1892.

Shakespeare’s tale of a brave man whose ambitious fantasies (and those of his wife) lead him to murder a king, usurp the crown, and become a corrupt and brutal tyrant consumed by guilt, pushes numerous Romantic buttons with its witches, woods and medieval castles. Strauss, however, chose not to depict the action of the play in sequential detail; only two characters, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, are specifically identified. Formally, the piece is an extended sonata design.

It opens in a way that would become familiar in many later works, with what is sometimes called a ‘nature theme’, featuring intervals of the perfect fourth and fifth. As well as immediately evoking an imaginary ancient world, this ringing, tonally stable music, in the view of Strauss scholar Norman Del Mar, represents ‘kingliness’. It might also offer us a glimpse of the uncorrupted Macbeth that we meet at the start of the play, though Macbeth himself is depicted, according to Strauss, in the two themes that follow on from the fanfare: one a striving melody that quickly mounts over two octaves, and a rhythmically emphatic melody heard first in the bass.

An energetic bridge passage using these three elements might suggest the memory of the recent battle. When Lady Macbeth appears, Strauss inscribes her speech from Act I, Scene v (‘Hie thee hither/ that I might pour my spirits in thine ear’) above her first theme, a luminous quiet passage in simple chords from the winds, which is then contrasted with a syncopated agitato theme accompanied by whirling sextuplets.

Strauss develops these themes in a counterpoint that he learned from his study of Wagner (he conducted Tristan und Isolde for the first time in 1892, and ‘it was the happiest day of my life’); Del Mar likens this to a conversation between the couple that begins amicably but becomes more agitated as Lady Macbeth pours her spirits in her husband’s ear. Three powerful statements of the ‘kingly’ fanfare interrupt the section and from this critical moment the music becomes ever more turbulent, suggesting bloody violence, the knocking on the gate and the corruption of Macbeth. But as Del Mar argues, Strauss is less interested in Macbeth’s deeds than in his psychological state as his idealism is degraded, leaving him with only his courage.

The original version concluded with a march of triumph, representing Macduff holding ‘the usurper’s cursed head’, but Strauss was prevailed upon by his mentor Hans von Bülow (who found the piece ‘maddening and numbing but in the end a work of genius’) to remove it. Instead, once the tumult and the shouting dies, a mournful cor anglais introduces a quiet, introspective coda, with the hint of a distant march (the advancing army, perhaps), a brief melodic swell and a final statement of Macbeth’s first theme before a sudden simple cadence.

© Gordon Kerry 2016

First Performance:
13 October 1891, Weimer. Composer conducting. The final version was given its premiere in Berlin in 1892.

First WASO Performance:
This is the first performance by the West Australian Symphony Orchestra.

Instrumentation:
three flutes (3rd also piccolo), two oboes, cor anglais, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons and contrabassoon; four horns, three trumpets, bass trumpet, three trombones and tuba; timpani, tam-tam, bass drum, cymbals, snare drum and strings.

Max Bruch
(1838-1920)

Violin Concerto No.1 in G minor, Op.26

Vorspiel [Prelude] (Allegro moderato) –
Adagio
Finale (Allegro energico)

Max Bruch’s First Violin Concerto is one of the greatest success stories in the history of music. The violinist Joseph Joachim, who gave the first performance of the definitive version in 1868, and had a strong advisory role in its creation, compared it with the other famous 19th century German violin concertos, those of Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Brahms. Bruch’s, said Joachim, is ‘the richest, the most seductive’.

Joachim was closely associated as performer with all four of these concertos, and with the creation of Brahms’ concerto, which he premiered in 1879. Soon Bruch was able to report that his concerto was ‘beginning a fabulous career’. In addition to Joachim, the most famous violinists of the day took it into their repertoire: Auer, Ferdinand David, Sarasate. With his first important largescale orchestral work, the 30-year-old Bruch had a winner.

The success of this concerto was to be a mixed blessing for Bruch. Few composers so long-lived and prolific are so nearly forgotten except for a single work. Kol nidrei for cello and orchestra is Bruch’s only other frequently performed piece, its use of Jewish melodies having erroneously led many to assume that Bruch himself was Jewish.

Bruch followed up this violin concerto with two more, and another six pieces for violin and orchestra. But although he constantly encouraged violinists to play his other concertos, he had to concede that none of them matched his first. This must have been especially frustrating considering that Bruch had sold full rights in it to a publisher for the paltry sum of 250 thalers.

In 1911, an American friend, Arthur Abell, asked Bruch why he, a pianist, had taken such an interest in the violin. He replied, ‘Because the violin can sing a melody better than the piano can, and melody is the soul of music.’

It was the composer’s association with Johann Naret-Koning, concertmaster of the Mainz orchestra, which first set Bruch on the path of composing for the violin. He did not feel sure of himself, regarding it as ‘very audacious’ to write a violin concerto, and reported that between 1864 and 1868 ‘I rewrote my concerto at least half a dozen times, and conferred with x violinists.’

The most important of these was Joachim. Many years later Bruch had reservations about the publication of his correspondence with Joachim about the concerto, worrying that ‘the public would virtually believe when it read all this that Joachim composed the concerto, and not I’.

Like Mendelssohn in his E minor Violin Concerto, Bruch brings the solo violin in right from the start, after a drum roll and a motto-like figure for the winds. The alternation of solo and orchestral flourishes suggests to Michael Steinberg a dreamy variant of the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto.

With the main theme launched by the solo violin in sonorous double-stopping, and a contrasting descending second subject, a conventional opening movement in sonata form seems to be under way. The rhythmic figure heard in the plucked bass strings plays an important part. But at the point where the recapitulation would begin, Bruch, having brought back the opening chords and flourishes, uses them instead to prepare a soft subsiding into the slow movement, which begins without a pause.

The songful character of the violin is to the fore in Bruch’s Adagio, where two beautiful themes are linked by a memorable transitional idea featuring a rising scale.

The Hungarian or Gypsy dance flavour of the last movement’s lively first theme must be a tribute to the native land of Joachim, who had composed a ‘Hungarian’ Concerto for violin. Bruch’s
theme was surely in Brahms’ mind at the same place in the concerto he composed for Joachim.

Bruch’s writing for the solo violin, here, scales new heights of virtuosity. Of the bold and grand second subject, Tovey observes that Bruch’s work ‘shows one of its noblest features just where some of its most formidable rivals become vulgar’. In this concerto, for once Bruch was emotional enough to balance
his admirable skill and tastefulness. The G minor Violin Concerto is just right, and its success shows no sign of wearing out.

Abridged from a note by David Garrett © 2004

First Performance:
January 1868, Bremen, Joseph Joachim as soloist.

First WASO Performance:
15 May 1943 with conductor Percy Code and soloist Lionel Lawson.

Most Recent WASO Performance:
20-21 November 2020 with conductor Guy Noble and soloist Laurence Jackson.

Instrumentation:
two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, timpani, strings.

Robert Schumann
(1810-1856)

Symphony No.4 in D minor, Op.120
Ziemlich langsam [Rather slow] – Lebhaft
[Lively] – Romanze (Ziemlich langsam)
[Rather slow] – Scherzo (Lebhaft) [Lively] –
Langsam [Slow] – Lebhaft [Lively]

This symphony was composed during the happy first year of Schumann’s marriage toClara Wieck, which had been resisted with almost legendary fierceness by her father, Friedrich. By September 1841 (less than two weeks after the birth of their first child, Marie), Clara was able to write in her diary, ‘My birthday was a day filled from morning to night with enjoyment and happiness. Robert surprised me with so many things, his completed Symphony in D minor…’

The music cannot have come as a complete surprise to her, however: as Clara wrote in her diary some four months earlier, ‘Yesterday [Robert] started another symphony…[I can hear] D minor sounding wildly in the distance, so I already know in advance that it is again a work created out of the deepest soul.’

Nor had this ‘completed symphony’ yet achieved its final form. Schumann was unsatisfied at its first performance in Leipzig in 1841, and put it aside. A revised version was presented ten years later, and it is this which is generally played today.

The work succeeds primarily on thebasis of its structural brilliance. As Hans Gál says, ‘The Fourth Symphony is [Schumann’s] most ingenious experiment in form, an amazingly successful attempt at unifying the four movements of a cyclic work without altering their individual character and structure.’

A precedent for a large-scale unified cyclic work existed in Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy. Schumann was no doubt at one stage sufficiently conscious of the Wanderer’s precedent to call this work a ‘Symphonic Fantasy’. Schumann’s Fourth Symphony, says Gál, is:

…music of irresistible momentum, a marvellous union of continuous improvisation and close construction, and its four movements, linked by thematic threads, are in ideal balance and magnificently contrasted…In Schumann’s symphony, the thematic lay-out progresses from one movement to another, new inventions emerging while the former ones reappear in variation as if it were an act of spontaneous recollection.

The work begins with a slow introduction, a strongly phrased motif which extends to a 28-bar paragraph, one of the main pillars of the structure. This introduction segues into the main fast section, having anticipated the fast section’s opening material.

The continuous semiquaver movement of the Lebhaft (Allegro) motif is hard to stop and therefore Schumann draws his subsidiary motif from the same material. With a limited pool of themes to expound upon, Schumann leaves till later, to the development section, a genuinely contrasting lyrical melody, and the responsibility for providing an impressive climax. Because the opening material has been sufficiently presented in the exposition, a customary recapitulation is unnecessary. There is a pause on a held note and we almost slip into the slow movement.

The main feature of the Romanze is an elegiac oboe melody. With the return of triple metre and a tempo similar to the opening of the symphony, the opening motif from the first movement sees the opportunity to re-enter, providing an interlude-like passage. A contrasting middle section extends this opening motif into a soft, expressive tune while a solo violin elegantly paraphrases it. The elegiac oboe returns, the music pauses, and without more ado, the Scherzo is launched.

This is vigorously scored with driving imitation in the lower strings. The trio turns out to be an old acquaintance: the graceful figuration that the solo violin had added to a motif in the Romanze.

The Scherzo returns and then Schumann, following the example of Beethoven in his Fourth, Sixth and Seventh Symphonies, lets the trio come back once more, but this time slowed down so that we may move without interruption into the opening section of the finale (Langsam).

With the striking fortissimos of the final allegro section, we have another moment of recognition, for here again is the climactic music from the first movement, capping off the gradual build-up of tension and effect. It is this sense of inevitable momentum and intense accumulation that provides the listener with so much enjoyment. Critics may praise unity and balance – the work’s skilful links put one in mind of Wagner’s observation that all composing is, at the base of it, the art of transition – but it is this symphony’s sense of inevitable progress and triumphant release that really draws the listener in.

Adapted from a note by Gordon Williams

Symphony Australia © 2002

First Performance:
6 December 1841, Leipzig. Gewandhaus Orchestra conducted by Ferdinand David.

First WASO Performance:
9 September 1944. Percy Code, conductor.

Most Recent WASO Performance:
17-18 November 2017. Asher Fisch, conductor.

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