45. Music for Spring

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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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A few weeks ago we listened to Vivaldi's Nulla Pax in Mundo, sung by Emma Kirkby. Quattro Stagioni may well be your favourite pizza, but it is of course the title of Vivaldi's most famous piece, The Four Seasons. Four separate violin concertos conveying each one. It would be hard to overstate Vivaldi's influence on the Baroque period, even though his music had to wait some two hundred years before getting its full appreciation. We're now well into spring, so it seems appropriate to start with the first of the set. Just like Beethoven would do nearly a hundred years later with his pastoral symphony, Vivaldi wrote very specific notes to accompany the music, making it clear what each movement portrayed. So these concertos are highly revolutionary and original in that regard alone, for being the very first example of what is now called programmatic music. All within just a few minutes in the opening movement, you get this unmistakable announcement that spring is here, followed by an outburst of bird song with gentle breezes leading to a thunderstorm which gives way to the birds once more. The slow movement reflects the sleeping goat herd, and those two background notes you can hear on the violas is the sound of a barking dog before the final movement rejoins the celebration of spring with dancing shepherds. It all makes perfect sense, and also brings far greater appreciation to something which almost all of us will have heard at some point or another. Because as a whole, the four seasons are probably the most overplayed pieces of all classical music, and we get so used to hearing them that they lose their mystery and charm. Another consequence is that musicians are constantly on the lookout to make their own mark on the works, which I just think is unnecessary. The music speaks for itself, and in the right hands will be allowed to work its spell without embellishment or interference. So here is Spring in Full, in the traditional fast, slow, fast format of a concerto played by Alana Yussefian and the voices of music. Too much attention is paid to his very popular pieces, and not enough to a vast output of talent across most of the disciplines of classical music. My hunch is that he doesn't get the reverence he deserves for the very simple reason that unlike the greats of Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, and others, he was born into a highly privileged and wealthy family, causing many to assume that composing was not a financial necessity for him, thus somehow rendering it lacking in soul. It's not an accusation you'd ever hear laid at the doors of Handel or Haydn, neither of whom ever had to worry where the next penny was coming from. A privileged life does not disqualify you from creating pieces which give lasting pleasure. And I wish people could look beyond the violin concerto, Hebrides Overture, music for a Midsummer Night's Dream, to name a few, all of them wonderful creations, certainly. You may well be familiar with what I'm about to play now, but it is so innocently charming that I'm sure you won't object. Mendelssohn's second symphony was called Laubsgesang, Hymn of Praise. At the end of it, he added a number of choral pieces, which had him unfairly compared with Beethoven, who had famously concluded his ninth with voices. Wagner was particularly scathing, but I suspect there was a touch of the green-eyed monster here. One of the choral pieces was I Waited for the Lord, now sung as a standalone anthem. There's nothing sugar about this. It is quite simply utterly charming. I Waited for the Lord is sung here by David Flood and Tim Harper with a choir of Canterbury Cathedral. But if you forced me to choose one, I would have to select the finale, or the fifth symphony by Jean Sibelius. Sebelius was asked writing his fifth symphony in celebration of his fiftieth birthday, which was declared a national holiday in Finland. It's unusual in its structure, in that it has just three movements, but everything in the rest of the symphony is heading towards this majestic finale. We're told that the main theme came to Sibelius as he saw a bevy of sixteen swans take flight from a lake. We talked about programmatic music earlier in the podcast with Vivaldi, and here it is again, nearly 250 years later. You can really feel the weight of the swans as they take flight. After a slightly frenzied opening, that theme is introduced by the brass and is never far away during the rest of the movement. Sibelius really holds back before unleashing a measured build-up to an extraordinary climax, with a piece ending on six distinct paced-out chords. It is truly one of the great finishes. So, as we say in our family, hit the volume. The finale of Sibelius' fifth symphony is played here by the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Essabeka Salon.

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That's it for now. Thank you for listening to Perfect Pitch with Nick Healy Hutchinson. 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.