18. Comfort and Joy

SPEAKER_01 0:15

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.

SPEAKER_00 0:41

Whilst the Requiem Mass is a piece of music about death, be it for the dead or those who mourn them, the way that the brief is interpreted has varied enormously over the ages. An inevitable consequence of that is that experts hold strong views about whether or not a particular version cuts the mustard, almost as if there's a right and wrong way to write one. I remember asking one such expert a few years ago whether he'd ever heard the Brahms piece, to which he somewhat pompously replied that only two proper requiemes had ever been composed. I didn't stop to ask which two he had in mind. I suspect Mozart would justifiably have filled one of the slots, but you can be fairly certain that the other would not have been taken by the French composer Gabrielle Forre, who lived between eighteen forty-five and nineteen twenty-four. And that, in fairness, is probably right. Dvorjak, Berlioz, Verdi, Duroufle, Britain, to name a mere handful, all wrote requiemes which might be regarded as superior in terms of their construction and orchestration. But no one can be the sole arbiter of what appeals to the ear. Foray's requiem is by a country mile his most popular composition, yet the purists struggle to take it seriously. Even his fellow countrymen, Pulank, detested it, declaring it a real penance to have to listen to it. It's not hard to see why it's treated as shallow, at only half an hour in length and scored for a soprano, a baritone, a choir, organ, and a small orchestra. It suffers from having a reputation for being too calm and overly charming, as well as not being sufficiently Christian. But Foray, not himself in any way a devout Christian, which was perhaps just as well, for he was a notorious Philanderer, was tired of the music he had to perform on the organ during burial services, and simply wanted, as he put it, to write something different. That's certainly how the priest viewed it on his first performance in 1888, telling him that we don't need these novelties. In short, his chief criticism seems to be that it just isn't serious enough. There's certainly no great fear of death in the music, but more a consoling and tuneful account. And even the untrained ear can discern that the orchestration is far from sophisticated. What's hard to refute, though, is that it's a composition of lovely melodies and surely one of the most accessible pieces of choral music ever written. So if you like a good tune, you're warm to these few minutes. It's my favourite passage of the piece. It's a lovely tune, with one or two big leaps, the choir participating with its own theme before returning to the original tune. It may be unsophisticated to many, and yet I detect a clear contrast between its reference to death and a very palpable, if irregular, heartbeat underscoring it. That device alone dispels the charge of a lack of Christian hope in the peace, in a tenuous reference to everlasting life. Even the dear's ear, the reference to the Day of Judgment, is a relatively fleeting passage. Charm and consolation have to be more welcome at death than fear and trepidation. The Liberame from Thoris Requiem is sung here by Gerald Finley with the choir of King's College, Cambridge, conducted by Stephen McCleberry. Foray was no less capable of dishing out the insults. In a letter to his wife, he wrote about the music of his fellow countryman Jules Massonet as vulgar, impassioned whinings. That's not a very kind assessment of someone who turned out to be the most prolific opera writer in late 19th century France. Georges Bizet, whose operatic output was very similar, was more generous. We must keep an eye on this little chap. He's going to leave us all standing. Unfortunately, by the end of his life, his audiences had become a little weary of his music, which is certainly on the sentimental side, and the plots of his operas, which tended to focus on fallen women. But the three most famous Manor, Veta, and Thaisa continue to get good outings. Thais is the story of a high-living courtesan who is approached in the first act by a monk with the aim of persuading her to change her ways. After making his case, Massine slips in this passage of orchestral writing with a solo violin, known as the Meditation, after which Thais follows the monk into the desert for a rather different lifestyle altogether. Before I play the Meditation, I'm reminded of a story which shows the pitfalls are blagging about classical music if you haven't done a little bit of your homework first. Mano was an opera which was also set to music by Puccini. On the spotting that someone had put classical music as an interest on his CV, one headhunter I met asked the candidate what he'd last seen. Oh, we went to see something called Mannel. Lovely. Was that the massenet? Brief pause. And then, with some conviction, No no, I'm quite certain it was an evening performance. In this version, Alexei Guriniuk on the piano accompanies Nicola Benedetti. Most of us will never be lucky enough to be invited to share our eight favourite recordings on Desert Island discs. But almost all of us, of whatever musical persuasion, will at some point toy with our choices, either in our minds or discussing them with others. Schubert's Great Teenager Symphony and Barker's Matthew Passion would be my only non-negotiable entries. But after that, I'm just as likely to need Aretha Franklin, Annie Lennox, or David Bowie on a desert island as Mozart, Chopper, and countless others. Deciding what to leave out becomes a difficult exercise. Unless, or maybe especially if, your name happens to be Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, one of the very finest lyric sopranos of the last century. In July 1958, she was welcomed onto the programme by its creator Roy Plumley after the deliciously formal introduction of How Do You Do, ladies and gentlemen? She then went on to select her eight favourites, of which only one did not feature her own voice. In later years, she would protest that the format had not been explained to her properly, and that she had understood the brief, also to select from her own recordings the ones which had come to mean the most to her. I think there's a little bit too much of protestation here. First, she was gracious enough to include one other piece, uh not a singer, of course. And secondly, you only need a couple of minutes of listening to it, to be clear that she's attempting to justify her approach from the start. Which as some might say was not entirely inconsistent with her personality. When talking about Schwarzkopf, an artist no longer with us, I find myself torn between not speaking ill of the dead and knowing that the deceased cannot be libeled, but only briefly. By most accounts, she was a fairly ghastly woman, an unrepentant member of the Nazi party, and something of a bully in master classes. She was, however, blessed with a lovely face and the most exquisite singing voice, which was enough to melt the heart of my late father when he picked up a telephone call at work some twenty five years ago. And so there are times we just have to suck up our prejudices in order to enjoy the output. Even if I've always found it easier to appreciate a performer in any artistic field if he or she seems well likable. Shallow maybe, but true. Anyway, I digress. I go back to the music. Twentieth century opera can spook a lot of people, not without reason, but there are some notable exceptions who stood up for melody against the background of fashionable atonality. One such a champion was the Austrian-born and US naturalised Eric Korngold, who lived between 1897 and 1957. He was declared a genius by Mahler before he was ten, and so gifted a pianist that when his mother was asked how long he'd been playing the piano, she's reported to have replied, Eric has always played the piano. Again, such head-inflating odds, Korngold turned out to be a thoroughly engaging, likable man, in much demand as a composer of countless film scores, earning him Oscars and further nominations, as well as other chamber music and a popular violin concerto. Marietta's lead from his opera Die Totestadt at the Dead City, composed between 1916 and 1920, pays more than a nod to the greatest of all writers of soprano, Ricardo Strauss. It's about the dream of a widower who falls in love with a dancer, Marietta, who is the double of his late wife, the two of them becoming rivals in the dreamer's eye. It's an aria with a gorgeous, almost aching tune, a hymn to times past, and the frailty of human life. This recording did not catch Charles Goth selector's eye. With its horribly ironic title, an underlying message, it now forms a fitting lament to the tragic impact which the pandemic had on every city for eighteen months. Though sorrow becomes dark, come to me, my true love. Death will not separate us. If you must leave me one day, believe there is an afterlife. Let's finish today with something a little more upbeat. William Boyce was an English composer whose likes for the much of the 18th century, which meant he was up against the likes of Bark at one end and Mozart at the other. In fact, it was their growing popularities that consigned Boyce's music to the archives until the beginning of the last century, when the composer Constance Lambert rediscovered his work and gained them the popularity they deserve. Much of his work concentrated on church and choral music, and as master of the king's music, he was responsible for producing works of important ceremonial occasions. But he didn't think he could improve on Handels as aid of the priest, which is why that album has been played at every coronation since 1761. He also wrote eight symphonies, all of them bright and shirty, and all of them very short. So we've got time to listen to the Holy Symphony number four in just a few moments, here played by the Bournemouth Symphonietta directed by Ronald Thomas.

SPEAKER_01 32:14

He'll be back again next week with some more treasures for you, so please do join him then. And you can subscribe to this podcast by clicking on the link below.