The Israeli Opera’s music director, Asher Fisch, has just been appointed as Seattle Opera’s Principal Guest Conductor. No stranger to Seattle audiences, Maestro Fisch conducted the performance that inaugurated McCaw Hall in 2003. He was most recently seen on the podium there this past August.
The stylish, hardworking Israeli is apparently something of a musical soulmate to Seattle Opera’s internationally acclaimed general director, Speight Jenkins.
“One of the reasons I appointed him is that we hear singers the same way,” Jenkins commented. “It is easy for us to resolve musical and vocal questions.”
Jenkins and the company he has led since 1983 have earned worldwide respect as presenters and innovators in this most complex of the performing arts. Their most recent show, Iphegenie en Tauride, is a co-production with New York’s Metropolitan Opera.
In particular, Seattle Opera has established a reputation for its commitment to the music of Richard Wagner. Fans are already making plans to attend Seattle Opera’s next four-opera Wagner “Ring” cycle, in August 2009.
Between now and then, Fisch and Jenkins are auditioning young singers for Seattle Opera’s second Wagner Competition, which launched to great excitement in August 2006. (That new competition, plus his acclaimed conducting of Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier last March, earned Fisch the title of Seattle Opera Artist of the Year last season.) After hearing singers in Munich, London, New York and Seattle, Fisch and Jenkins will announce finalists in January for the August 16, 2008 competition — an evening concert with full orchestra. Fisch will conduct.
In demand as both an opera and orchestral conductor with major orchestras in Europe, the U.S. and Japan in 2008, Fisch will make his debut at the historic Teatro alla Scala conducting The Merry Widow.
Seattle Symphony audiences have also heard him on the podium at Benaroya Hall.
Fisch does not expect to make his home in Seattle.
Fisch waxes passionate on the subject of Wagner, whose music he still cannot perform with his Tel Aviv-based company. In a 2004 interview with this newspaper, he addressed those who criticize his love for Wagner’s music with his own Vienna-born mother’s pride in his return to the city she fled. The irony of some of those critics’ ignorance of basic information does not escape him: the composer some have called “Hitler’s friend” lived and died before the 20th century even began; Israeli concerts include other music (like The Merry Widow) that was forced upon Jewish listeners in the depths of the Shoah. Anti-Semitism in 19th-century Europe was hardly confined to the Wagner family.
Fisch’s “sink or swim” encounter with Wagner’s music occurred as a protégé of another Israeli conductor, Daniel Barenboim, in Vienna. He hasn’t looked back since.
“Asher Fisch has conducted some of the greatest performances of Wagner and Strauss that Seattle Opera has ever enjoyed,” said Speight Jenkins. “He is vastly knowledgeable about opera, has impeccable taste, has a great deal of experience in the practical decisions of working in an opera company, and, finally, has great rapport with the musicians who comprise our orchestra. I consider it an honor to Seattle Opera that he has accepted my offer to be Principal Guest Conductor.”
A new (guest) gig
