La Mer

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.

Sara Macliver
Soprano

Sara Macliver is one of Australia’s most popular and versatile artists, and is regarded as one of the leading exponents of Baroque repertoire. Sara is a regular performer with all the Australian Symphony Orchestras as well as the Perth, Melbourne and Sydney Festivals, Pinchgut Opera, the Australian Chamber Orchestra and Australian Brandenburg Orchestra, Musica Viva Australia, and a number of international companies. Sara records for ABC Classics, with more than 35 CDs and many awards to her credit.

In recent years, Sara has sung with the West Australian, Sydney, Melbourne, Queensland, Adelaide and Tasmanian Symphony Orchestras, Pinchgut Opera, West Australian Opera, Australian String Quartet, St George’s Cathedral, Auckland Philharmonic Orchestra, Bangalow Festival, Collegium Musicum, Sydney Philharmonia, Freeze Frame Opera, Ten Days on the Island, Peninsula Summer Festival, Brisbane Camerata, ANAM, Melbourne Philharmonic and Genesis Baroque amongst other projects.

In 2025, she performs with the West Australian, Sydney and Canberra Symphony Orchestras, the Australian String Quartet, ANAM, Brisbane Chamber Choir, Genesis Baroque and Sydney Chamber Choir.

Sara has been awarded an honorary doctorate from The University of Western Australia (UWA) in recognition of her services to singing. She is on staff at the Conservatorium of Music at UWA and sits on the Boards of the West Australian Symphony Orchestra and Freeze Frame Opera.

Andrew Goodwin
Tenor

Andrew Goodwin has appeared with opera companies in Europe, the UK, Asia and Australia, including the Bolshoi Opera, Gran Theatre Liceu Barcelona, Teatro Real Madrid, La Scala Milan, Opera Australia, Pinchgut Opera and Sydney Chamber Opera. He has performed with the St Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra, Moscow and Melbourne Chamber Orchestras, all the Australian Symphony Orchestras, and has given recitals at Wigmore Hall, Oxford Lieder, and major Australian music festivals.

This year, Andrew returns to West Australian Symphony Orchestra (for Stanhope’s Mahāsāgar), Four Winds Festival, Adelaide Festival, Victoria Chorale (Creation), Adelaide Symphony (Mozart’s Requiem), Sydney Chamber Choir (Bach Mass in B minor), and Brisbane Chamber Choir and Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (Messiah).

Recent engagements include Renaud in Stravinsky’s The Nightingale and other fables (Adelaide Festival); the Narr in Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder (Sydney Symphony); Mozart’s Requiem (Sydney Philharmonia, MSO, TSO, QSO); Evangelist, St. Matthew Passion (Melbourne Bach Choir); Haydn’s Creation (Australian Haydn Ensemble); Messiah (Canberra, Melbourne, Queensland, New Zealand Symphony Orchestras); Mills’ Nativity (ASO), and Carmina burana (MSO, also in Singapore).

Andrew studied voice at the St. Petersburg Conservatory and in the UK and is the winner of many scholarships including the Tait Memorial Trust Scholarship, the Martin Bequest Travelling Scholarship, the Sir Robert Askin Operatic Travelling Scholarship, and the Australian Opera Auditions Committee Joan Sutherland Richard Bonynge Scholarship.

WASO Chorus

The WASO Chorus was formed in 1988 and consists of over 100 volunteer choristers who represent the finest form of community music making, bringing together singers from all walks of life. They regularly feature in the WASO annual concert season and are directed by Hugh Lydon.

The Chorus has built an international reputation for its high standards and diverse range of repertoire. While its main role is to perform with the West Australian Symphony Orchestra, the Chorus also maintains a profile of solo concerts, tours and community engagements.

The Chorus sings with the finest conductors and soloists including Asher Fisch, Simone Young, Stephen Layton and Paul Daniel. Recent highlights have included Mahler’s Symphony No.8 and Britten’s War Requiem. In 2019, the Chorus performed at the Denmark Festival of Voice and in 2018 toured China with performances of Orff’s Carmina burana.

In 2020, they performed two Gala events on the Kalbarri Skywalk. In 2023, the Chorus was invited to Hobart to perform Brahms’ German Requiem with the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra (TSO), the TSO Chorus, Sydney Philharmonia Choirs and members of the public, conducted by Simon Halsey. Last year, the WASO Chorus performed with members of the WA Opera Chorus, the UWA Symphonic Chorus, Voyces and Aquinas College’s Schola Cantorum in WASO’s presentation of Mahler’s Symphony No.8.

Aquinas College Schola Cantorum

The Aquinas College Schola Cantorum is a choir of 51 choristers, currently consisting of boys between Years 4-12. Known throughout the College as the Schola, it is a choral program unique to Aquinas College.

Formed in 2019, the Schola contributes significantly to the liturgical component of Aquinas College’s identity by singing at three weekly Chapel Services, as well as at significant College events. In addition to these, the Schola also performs at the Saturday Vigil Mass at St Patrick’s Basilica, Fremantle every week during term time. On average, each chorister spends nine hours a week making music in addition to their school commitments.

The Schola is regularly invited to perform in external events with other organisations. Past performances with WASO include Britten’s War Requiem, Mahler’s Third Symphony, Lachlan Skipworth’s The Tides of Longing (which was nominated for an APRA AMCOS Arts Award), and Mahler’s Eighth Symphony. Numerous choristers have also had the opportunity to perform as part of the WA Opera Children’s Chorus, for productions including Tosca and Carmen.

Hugh Lydon Chorus Director

Richard Wagner
(1813-1883)

The Flying Dutchman: Overture

The Flying Dutchman tells the story of a sea captain who, living under a curse, is doomed to sail the seas for all eternity or until he is released from his torment through the love and redemptive sacrifice of a pure woman. He anchors his phantom ship in a sheltered cove in Norway and finds in a young woman, Senta, the redeemer he longs for. Senta, too, yearns to liberate the Dutchman and in the closing moments of the opera casts herself into the sea to be united with her beloved in death.

The robust theme announced by the horns at the beginning of the overture is strongly associated with the Dutchman. The turbulent rising and falling waves thrashed out by the strings and the pervasive and unstable diminished seventh harmonies suggest a terrifying ocean voyage. The ocean is tamed, however, with the appearance of one of Senta’s melodies, enunciated by the cor anglais and supported by other woodwinds. We have moved from the key of D minor to F major and have sailed into harmonically stable waters. But, the period of calm is short-lived, for we soon return to D minor and the turbulent themes associated with the accursed protagonist. Thematic contrast appears in the form of the buoyant Norwegian sailors’ song (again in F major and enunciated by the winds) but this, too, is thwarted by the Dutchman and the tempestuous sea. Finally, Senta’s ‘redemption’ theme rings out triumphantly in D major, signifying that peace has come at last to the tragic, long-suffering Dutchman.

Abridged from Robert Gibson © 1999

First performance of the Opera: 2 January 1843, Dresden. Composer conducting.
Most recent WASO performance: 27-28 August 2021. Asher Fisch, conductor.
Instrumentation: three flutes (one doubling piccolo), two each of oboes (one doubling cor anglais), clarinets and bassoons; four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba; timpani, harp and strings.

Maurice Ravel
(1875-1937)

Une Barque sur l’océan

Ravel was not only a great pioneer of piano writing, but a great orchestrator who could adapt a piano piece and make it sound as if it had originally been conceived for orchestra. His orchestration of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition is a spectacular example.

A Boat on the Ocean began life as the most impressionistic of Ravel’s piano set Miroirs, composed 1904-1906. Ravel began orchestrating it in October 1906, some nine months after the first performance of the complete Miroirs by his friend, the Spanish pianist, Ricardo Viñes.

Critic Denis Herlin describes Une Barque as ‘a magical evocation of the sea, soaked in arpeggios, and climaxing in high trills.’ The structure of all sections of Miroirs is extremely subtle. At this time, Debussy was aiming to compose music with a form so free as to seem like an improvisation. Ravel ‘admitted that the work he had on hand was concerned with a similar problem’.

The complete Miroirs is a panorama of Ravel’s typical musical landscape. ‘Mirrors’ conveys perfectly the sense of subjects glimpsed objectively through reflection. Une Barque fits into that tradition of French music to which Ravel was heir: it paints rather than expresses emotion.

In the orchestral version, muted and glissando strings substitute for the piano’s arpeggios. Oboe, cor anglais and trumpet solos delineate the briefest of melodic motifs, like fragments of line glimpsed through a wash. Critic Pierre Laloy said that Une Barque was ‘a collection of examples… of how to alter the timbre of an instrument…In Ravel’s orchestration… there are no trumpets but muted ones.’

Ravel was not happy with his initial attempt at orchestration. He withdrew the piece after its first performance, but came back to it and introduced the reworking on 30 October 1926.

Gordon Kalton Williams
Symphony Australia © 2008

First performance: 3 February 1907, Paris. Gabriel Pierné conducting.
First WASO performance: 3-4 August 2001. George Pehlivavian, conductor.
Most recent WASO performance: 11-12 July 2008. Oleg Caetani, conductor.
Instrumentation: three flutes (two doubling piccolo), two oboes, cor anglais, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet and two bassoons; four horns, two trumpets, three trombones and tuba; timpani, three percussion, two harps, celesta and strings.

Claude Debussy
(1862-1918)

La Mer – Three Symphonic Sketches

De l’aube à midi sur la mer (From Dawn to Noon on the Sea)
Jeux de vagues (Play of Waves)
Dialogue du vent et de la mer (Dialogue of the Wind and the Sea)

‘Never before had that marvellous music La Mer appeared so seductive and yet mysterious at the same time, so imbued with the enigmatic life of the Cosmos, than on that evening when her great creator, with a gentle hand, was ruling over her waves.’

So wrote a young Russian composer, Lazare Saminsky, on hearing Debussy conduct La Mer in St Petersburg in 1913. But, the work’s greatness had by no means seemed self-evident when it had first appeared in 1905. Debussy himself was weathering a personal scandal, having left his second wife, and part of the lack of enthusiasm on the part of the Parisian public may have stemmed from its disapproval. The first performance, too, was by all accounts under-rehearsed and the conductor, Camille Chevillard, unsympathetic to Debussy’s style. The composer and conductor Lalo complained that he could neither hear, see nor feel the sea, and a reviewer in Boston wrote that ‘we clung like a drowning man to a few fragments of the tonal wreck, a bit of theme here, a comprehensible figure there, but finally this muted-horn sea overwhelmed us.’

The point missed by the authors of such remarks, however, is that Debussy’s music (both generally speaking and with regard to this work) is not intended as visual imagery, or the soundtrack to some imaginary film. The composer may have invited such misinterpretations: in subtitling the work ‘Three Symphonic Sketches’ he of course evokes the media of visual art; moreover, he often used terms like ‘colour’ and ‘shading’ when discussing his music. But, in 1903, when he began work on La Mer, Debussy wrote to a friend from the Burgundian countryside:

‘You may not know that I was destined for a sailor’s life, and that only chance led me in another direction…You will say that the ocean does not exactly bathe the hills of Burgundy, and my seascapes may be studio landscapes, but I have an endless store of memories, and in my mind they are worth more than reality, whose beauty often weighs heavily on the imagination.’

The work, then, is about the idea of the sea rather than being a representation of it; significantly, much of the composition of the work took place away from the coast.

Debussy’s genius for orchestration and subtle rhythmic organisation certainly make for an evocative work where it is possible to imagine the crash of waves, the call of seagulls and the protean movement of light on water. The final climactic moments of the first movement, for instance, somehow create a sense of emerging from the deep into the light.

Other masterly touches abound: the unusual timbre of cellos divided into four parts; the use of muted horns (which Debussy admitted to taking from the music of Weber) to evoke space; the soloistic use of wind instruments and harp.

But La Mer is as much ‘symphonic’ as it is ‘sketch’. Its three movements are by no means simply rhapsodic, but rather show Debussy’s subtle and careful approach to form. In the first movement, his careful development of short motifs is perfectly symphonic; the second movement, ‘Play of Waves’, is, among other things, a symphonic scherzo; and the third movement – which has one of the rare ‘big finishes’ of any work by this composer – is a symphonic finale.

The pianist and Debussy expert, Roy Howat, has also shown how Debussy’s structure corresponds to the ancient Greek idea of the Golden Section where a line is divided so that the ratio of the shorter portion to the longer portion forms the same ratio as the longer portion does to the whole length. By applying this formula to time, a composer can plot where significant events (changes of speed, colour moods or metre) will have the greatest dramatic effect. Howat has argued persuasively that the moment in the last movement of La Mer where the violins play a soft, impossibly high harmonic represents the Golden Section of the piece.

By a nice paradox, Debussy’s marvellous musical reflection on the constant flux of the sea is achieved by the most painstaking and careful calculation. Not for nothing did the published score carry the intricately designed woodcut The Hollow Wave by the Japanese artist Hokusai.

Abridged from a note by Gordon Kerry © 2005

First performance: 15 October 1905, Paris. Lamoureux Orchestra conducted by Camille Chevillard.
First WASO performance: 22-23 July 1966; Thomas Mayer, conductor.
Most recent WASO performance: 5-6 October 2018; Ludovic Morlot, conductor.
Instrumentation: two flutes, piccolo, two oboes, cor anglais, two clarinets, three bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, two cornets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, two harps, strings.

Paul Stanhope

Paul Stanhope is an award-winning Sydney-based composer and educator. He has had prominent performances of his works in the UK, Europe, Asia, and North and South America. After studies with Peter Sculthorpe at the University of Sydney, Paul studied at the Guildhall School of Music in London.

In May 2004, Paul’s international standing was confirmed when he was awarded first place in the Toru Takemitsu Composition Prize with Fantasia on a Theme of Vaughan Williams. He has also been awarded five APRA/Australian Music Centre Art Music Awards since 2011, and the David H. Tribe Symphonic Composition award in 2019 for his Trombone Concerto which was commissioned and premiered by the West Australian Symphony Orchestra.

Paul is an Associate Professor of Composition at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music and is also the Artistic Chair of the Australia Ensemble at the University of New South Wales. He was Music Director of Sydney Chamber Choir from 2006-2015.