15. Tragedy to dance, with something sublime in the mix.

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Do you think that classical music is not for you and you don't know where to start? Or maybe you're a fan already and would welcome a fresh approach. You've come to the right place. Perfect pitch is for everyone, beginners or experts, whatever your age. Lend Nick Healy Hutchinson your ears for his weekly dose of classical music that will enrich your life.

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Last week I referred with some disbelief to Benjamin Britton's scaling assessment of Giuseppe Verdi. So today I want to start by putting the case for the defence. It would be hard to overstate the popularity and impact which the Italian composer enjoyed during a life of 87 years in 1901. Of humble upbringing, who showed precocious musical talent from an early age, and even became the official paid organist at his local church at the age of eight. By the mid-1850s, he'd already amassed enough fame and fortune from his operas to dispense with music altogether, enabling him to concentrate on his love of the countryside. Although in much later years, he was persuaded to write three of his most popular operas, Aida, Otello, and Falstaff, that last one being his only comic opera of twenty-nine. He was the natural successor to Bellini, Donizetti, and Rossini, in the end of surpassing them all. With him, two major changes in Italian opera took place. The first is that he dispensed with recitatives, that's the general chit-chat which occurs between arias, either spoken or sung without tune, replacing it with continuous singing. So the tunes just keep rolling out. And the other change was to give the orchestra considerably more prominence, particularly in the characterization of his heroes and heroines. To illustrate that point, I'm going to play the prelude to one of his most popular operas, La Traviata, which had its first performance in March 1853. That performance, however, was not greeted with enormous enthusiasm, because it focused on an unsavory high-class courtesan, Violeta, as depicted in a contemporary novel by Alexander Dumas. So it wasn't just the subject matter which did not go down well, it was the fact that it was not a historical subject. Nowadays, Traviata ranks alongside Aida, Rigoletto, Don Carlos, Ortello, and Falstaff as being one of the most widely performed operas all over the world. This may well be familiar to you, but I've selected it because of the way it so cleverly gives you a taste of the four story in its orchestration. The opening bars take you immediately to the tragic ending of Violeta's life. Verdi portrays her sorry fate with this melancholic tune on the strings, very briefly interrupted by his trademark beat on the horns, by way of referring to the high living she adopts to escape the thoughts of her inevitable demise. Listen then to how the violins, reflecting her party-loving lifestyle, escape lightly about the ever-present reminder of her fate, as portrayed by the cello. It's all there in just a few minutes. The prelude to Act One of Verdi's laptop is played here by the Belly Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted here by Claudio Art. This is a 1966 recording by the Argentine Marta Argerich, whom we heard playing a Scarlatti sonato recently. For those of you who have not heard her before, I didn't really big her up enough then. She is quite simply one of the best pianists there's ever been. Now in her eighties, she has never really enjoyed the public arena, but her playing is characterized by tenderness and real passion in equal measure. This demanding Pizza displays those skills in full. Robert Schumann is supposed to have likened this ghetto to the poetry of Byron. Apparently, the opening notes, according to the composer himself, are supposed to be a question with the reply in the notes following. I have no idea what the question is, but it's easy to see what Chopin means. Wagner once described Chopin as a composer for the right hand. It's pieces like this which add some weight to that appraisal. In its entirety, the fourth is probably my personal favourite, but the slow movement of its fifth, known as the Emperor, is surely amongst the loveliest of all the slow movements of any piano concerto. Although the longest of the slow movements in Beethoven's five, stay with me, it's not a minute, even a second too long. Composed around 1809, the piece is deserving of its name by virtue of its length and magnitude, even if Beethoven would probably not have approved of the term. At the time he was writing it, he was taking shelter in the cellar of his brother's house, while Vienna was being bombarded by the French under the self-crowned Emperor Napoleon. It's believed Beethoven was about sixty percent deaf by now, so he was unable to play its first performance in 1810 as he had done with his previous four, and his attempt to perform it in 1811 had to be abandoned. And so to the music which I really can only describe as sublime, one simple definition of that word being of very great excellence or beauty. It has a dreamy introspective quality about it, in complete contrast to the majestic first moment and galloping jubilant last. The two tunes are gorgeous with lovely interaction between piano and orchestra, especially in its closing moments with flute and gentle strings. And in the opening, I always find myself thinking of there's a place for us from the song Somewhere in Leonard Bernstein's Westside Story. Bernstein was certainly a Beethoven fan, so maybe the idea is not so crazy. Listen out also for the way the piano climbs the keyboard on trills. It's extraordinarily beautiful. As the second movement finishes, Beethoven unusually heads straight into the third, a device later used by others, most notably Schumann in his only piano concerto, by letting the oboe drop a note to allow the piano to introduce the opening of a final romp. I hope your enjoyment of the previous six or seven minutes is not spoiled by being left in the lurch at the end. The second movement of Beethoven's piano concerto number five is played here in a live performance by Ellen Grimo with a Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Paavo Yevi. For those of you old enough, or perhaps I should say more specifically, interested enough, might recall that before the days of the Premier League, there used to be something called the First Division. My father and I had an understanding that composers and artists would fall into the first or second division. And so, to use now almost prerequisite phrase when announcing Lizard, in no particular order, Beethoven, Bach, Barrahm, Mozart, Hubert, Schumann, Sebosa, Ricardo Strauss, Handel, Haydn, Wagner, Chopper would all have their pages affected permanently in the first division with no prospect of relegation. And to coin another current phrase, other composers are of course available. The table would have no limits, but you could not put any of those in the same group as, say, Johannes Straus, Franz Lehar, or Arthur Sullivan, or he says with some trepidation, even Victor Haley Hart button, Edvar Greek, or a theme. So these would find their places in the second division and with little prosperity of promotion. It was just a bit of fun of course. And it was based on nothing more or less than the most scientifically stringent and robust of criteria for personal opinion. Composers who are now only known for one or two works would automatically find their place in the lower ranks, however prolific and influential their output may have been during their lives. One such example is the French Baroque composer Marc-Antoine Charpentier, who nowadays is only famous for one pizza. This one is Prelude to the Te Deum, played by the National Philharmonic Orchestra, and no point to you if you don't know what this is now used for. Instead of playing something famous, I'm going to leave you with something I don't expect many of you will have heard before, but it's fresh and full of charm, so we'll definitely be hearing more of his music on future podcasts. The Rigodon, a lively spirited dance by Kenny Salons, is played here by the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Geoffrey Simon.

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