This Friday night concert is a once-in-a-lifetime experience: the stars – violin soloist Simone Lamsma, WASO Principal Conductor Asher Fisch and the orchestra itself – aligned; the elements – Richard Strauss’ tone poem Macbeth, Bruch’s Violin Concerto No. 1 in G minor and Robert Schumann’s Symphony No. 4 in D minor – fused.

The resulting alchemy sets the stage ablaze.

Strauss’s Liszt-inspired early essay in the tone poem is as combustible as it is compact, painting not just a vivid double portrait of the characters Macbeth and Lady Macbeth but the doom-laden trajectory of their entwined fates.

Simone Lamsma, Asher Fisch and WASO. Photo © Daniel James Grant

Right from the ominous introduction, Fisch and WASO have the measure of these unsavoury yet compelling personalities. Implacable, they drive the latter’s themes – one refulgent in brass, the other seductively clothed in skeins of winds and violins – through Strauss’s hellish modulations, motivic transformations and calamitous counterpoints with a febrile operatic excess bordering on the unhinged.

The much-needed catharsis is left to the Bruch. And not just to those big tutti climaxes which Fisch and WASO so fervently and full-bloodedly despatch. 

For in the Dutch violinist Simone Lamsma, it is as though Bruch has found his ideal prophet of the future, such is her ability to so fully inhabit the music. When playing her 1703 Stradivarius “Aurora ex-Foulis”, everything seems effortless yet incandescently intense, from the most virtuosic to the most lyrical passages; when not playing, she sways to the orchestra such that she and Fisch seem more dancing partners than soloist and conductor. 

Structurally and emotionally, this is Strauss’ Macbeth in reverse, moving from a brooding, tenebrous gathering of fragments through a redemptive aria of sublime purity to a triumphant major-key finale bursting with folk-like exuberance. 

Lamsma’s encore, the final movement from Paul Hindemith’s Sonata Op.11 No. 6 for solo violin, is just plain insane – but in a good way. 

Simone Lamsma, Asher Fisch and WASO. Photo © Daniel James Grant

There is something of the tone poem – or certainly the orchestral fantasia; indeed, it originally wore the label of “symphonic fantasia” and we also feel its kinship with the improvisatory first moment of the much later Bruch – in Schumann’s Symphony No. 4, written in 1841 but revised a decade later.

Written in four movements to be performed attacca, it’s a veritable double portrait of the composer’s alter egos, the fiery Florestan and the contemplative Eusebius. Not for nothing has it been called the most “Schumannesque” of his four symphonies.

Fisch and WASO last performed this work in November 2017. Naturally, I can’t recall the details of that earlier performance. But I do remember its impact, as one remembers falling in love for the first time. Or being hit by a truck, lol.

I can’t begin to tell you how many live performances and recordings of this work I’ve heard. Few have come close to the way Fisch so clearly articulates the ubiquity and dynamism of the cyclical and thematic material while generating a precipitous forward momentum – even delicately yet persuasively during the beautiful second movement Romanze – of such potency and power.

Simone Lamsma, Asher Fisch and WASO. Photo © Daniel James Grant

Much of this has to do with the sharply accented cadential material, particularly in the accelerating first movement and the third movement Scherzo. But it is the sheer detail and inner tension within and among the various sections of the orchestra which contributes to, and contextualises, these gut-punch moments, strings, winds, brass and percussion so brilliantly balanced.

As we hurtle towards D major in the final movement’s coda, one already knows that this is indeed a once-in-a-lifetime experience. That we have kissed joy as it flies.