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...