In The Flying Dutchman (Der fliegende Holländer), Wagner – having flirted with fairy tale, Shakespeare and history in his first three operas – decisively departs the safe haven of conventional grand opera for the turbulent waters of mythopoetic transcendence.

This splendid concert performance sees WASO’s chief conductor and seasoned Wagnerian Asher Fisch guide soloists, orchestra and chorus through those same waters with a zeal tempered only by superlative craft which metaphorically binds Fisch to the mast lest he lost himself forever in passion’s seething ocean.

Asher Fisch conducts The Flying Dutchman. Photo © Daniel James Grant

The Flying Dutchman was first performed in Dresden in 1843 and variously inspired by the composer’s own perilous sea voyage from Riga to London, a near-universal legend of a cursed mariner and Heinrich Heine’s quirky take on the story in The Memoirs of Mister von Schnabelewopski.

The result is a compact three-act opera in which the accursed Dutchman, doomed to sail the world with his ghostly crew for all eternity but allowed ashore once every seven years to seek redemption in the form of a faithful wife, finds...