This third concert in the West Australian Symphony Orchestra’s complete Brahms symphony and concerto cycle under Principal Conductor Asher Fisch comprised an incisive yet fulsomely poetic reading of Brahms’ massive First Piano Concerto with American pianist Garrick Ohlsson followed by an elegantly explosive account of the compact Third Symphony.

That Brahms’ Piano Concerto No 1 in D Minor (first performed in 1859 with the composer at the keyboard) started life as a two-piano sketch for a symphony is well known; likewise its central Adagio’s being a dual homage to Brahms’ friends Robert and Clara Schumann. And yet, as Donald Francis Tovey writes in his analysis of the concerto, “With this work the genius of Brahms shook itself free alike from formalism and vagueness… the final result was inevitably a classical concerto, but one of unprecedented tragic power.”

This was likewise a performance of colossal tragic power in which Brahms’ Apollonian and Dionysian tendencies were reconciled by playing that was as free as it was disciplined. In the opening Maestoso, Ohlsson’s flexible, sonorous dispatching of double trills and octaves and other elaborations of deep structure, as well as his effortless rapport with individual members of the orchestra – at one point horn and...