★★★★★ Asher Fisch returns for 2016 with a knockout Teutonic Trio.

Perth Concert Hall​
March 18, 2016

There are few more stirring orchestral works than Wagner’s Tannhäuser Overture and Richard Strauss’s tone poem Also sprach Zarathustra. But slap Schumann’s Symphony No 2 between these two, as Asher Fisch and the WA Symphony Orchestra did on this occasion, and you end up with a very savory symphonic sandwich indeed.

This was WASO Principal Conductor and Artistic Advisor Fisch’s first appearance with the orchestra for 2016. German Romantic repertoire is very much his beat, and his first two years at the helm of WASO have already yielded, amongst other delights, acclaimed Beethoven and Brahms cycles.

So it came as no surprise that from the moment clarinets, bassoons and horns began intoning with such immaculate tuning and balance the hymn with which the Wagner opens you knew this was going to be a pretty good concert.

The Tannhäuser Overture duly unfolded with immense power and dignity, Fisch imploring with eloquent gestures every section, but the strings especially, to sing as they had never sung before. A finely responsive and alert WASO more than delivered.

Was the Schumann going to be a harder sell? His four symphonies have never been short of champions. But only now are they gradually being accepted – somewhat begrudgingly, one suspects – by concertgoers as the masterpieces they are.

Completed in 1846, the Symphony No 2 is the most Mendelssohnian of the four. Yet thanks to Fisch’s facility for crisp dramatisation that veers between neurotic outburst and cantabile melancholia, this was all Schumann. The slow introduction erupted into the exuberant Allegro, ma non troppo with such wrenching ebullience that the audience likewise erupted into spontaneous applause at the end of the movement.

Fisch took the Allegro vivace Scherzo – Schumann’s finest – at just that, eliciting another round of applause. The Adagio expressivo ushered in a darker, more yearning tone, the Schumann of Dichterliebe (and mention here must be made of Peter Facer’s supple, expressive oboe solo), while the final Allegro molto vivace brought the house down with the triumphant brilliance of both score and execution.

Fisch last took WASO through Strauss’s might tone poem after Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra back in 2009 as Guest Conductor. I can’t recall that performance, but I doubt it could have been as good as this one, largely because Fisch has done so much intensive work with each section of the orchestra over the last couple of years in just this kind of repertoire. Just cast your mind back to last year’s Don Quixote with Mischa Maisky and you’ll know what I mean.

Sunrise was all refulgent, goosebump-inducing majesty, while Of the Backworldsman (Von den Hinterweltlern) allowed the divided strings to display their wares to spectacular advantage in the more lyrical passages. Of Joys and Passions was all whirling emotion, pointing forward to Of Science’s dark fugue and febrile intensity of The Convalescent. Concertmaster Laurence Jackson then dispatched the suave violin solo in the luxuriant The Dance Song with considerable charm and an easy virtuosity before Fisch expertly steered the good ship WASO into the calm waters of the final exquisite Night Wanderer’s Song to end the piece, and the evening, in deliciously tranquil mode.