47. Four helpings of fun.

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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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There are certain composers, Bach, Beethoven and Mozart, obviously, whose reputations are so firmly established in the classical music repertoire that there will never be any question of them going out of fashion. But it's not true of all of them by any means. Gustav Mahler, for example, did not really come into prominence until the middle of the last century. And it was something of a surprise to hear none other than the recently deceased Bernard Heitig casually let a slip in a television programme that he thought Mahler might even be played a little too often these days. Composers are just like artists move in and out of fashion. Here's a good case in point, and one that proves how much there is out there to discover. Have you, I wonder, heard of the Austrian composer Emil Nicolaus von Oresnechek? You have? Okay, smart ass, but if you haven't, you certainly would have if you'd lived in Vienna in the late 1800s. His popularity was sealed in 1894, but it is a three-act comedy opera Adonna Diana, a work you'd struggle to find being performed nowadays. So despite leaving an extensive catalogue across lots of disciplines, symphonies, chamber music, choral music, opera, piano, and so on, the only piece that you're ever likely to hear being performed is the overture to that successful opera Adonna Diana. It's a bit of a mystery, really. Rosnichek was wrongly assumed to have Nazi sympathizers. It didn't help his son join the party, and his daughter, Felicitas, did form a close liaison with one of Hitler's adjutants. But it wasn't actually what it seemed on the outside. In fact, an Apillow talk was helpful to the British cause and rewarded by Churchill in granting her British citizenship. So it's hard to know why music like this has fallen from grave. It certainly can't just be down to a controversial reputation. Wagner would have been written out of history books long ago if that were the sole criterion. For whatever the reason, the solution is a very simple one. In the same way program compilers may need to play less than one composer, it would be nice to see them being a little more adventurous in playing music of those who have been neglected. There are, after all, plenty of composers and over just one piece alone. So why not dig out some overlooked and forgotten ones, such as ResinCheck? The overture has a delightful tune at its heart, and for those of you who can remember the work of Hector Berlios, I can definitely pick up some likenesses here in the sweeping strings and the brass punctuation. Actually, I'd say it's every bit as good. ResinCheck's overture to Donna Diana is played here by the Academy's Martin and the Fields and conducted by Neville Mariner. In exactly the same way Schubert's trout quintet has the formal title of piano quintet. A quintet is merely a piece for a quartet that has a four-string instrument, and a different one. In Schubert's case, a piano, and in Mozart's case now, a clarinet. A piece has four movements. We're going to listen to the last movement now, played by the Hagen string quartet, joined by the clarinetist Sabine Meyer. I just love this. Whether it is his native Czech in character or American has been a matter of lengthy debate over the years, with scholars desperately seeking for references of African American songs. All we do know for certain is Devorjak's own view, which is that he could not have written debt or the New World Symphony if he'd not been in America. I've spoken before of his speedy writing, and he knocked this one up in a matter of a couple of weeks. This is a quartet to really lift the spirits. There's no sophisticated development or dialogue between the instruments. It's a straightforward fun, pure and simple, and should be listened to and enjoyed in that vein. There's a briefest of reflective passages at its heart, but the overriding mood is one of immediacy and joy. And in that respect, it's a perfect example of the accessibility of classical music, and how sometimes you really don't have to delve beneath the surface for protracted explanations. You can just appreciate it for its innate quality alone. The fourth movement of the Vortex American String Quartet, number twelve, is played here by the Cleveland Quartet. I've been looking for an opportunity to play this next work, and after the playful music we listened to today, this seems as good a time as any. It's a piece by the little known Spanish composer Geronimo Jimenez, who spent most of his life between 1854 and 1923 in Madrid. Jimenez's stage work, La Boda de Luis Alonso, was his most famous piece, and this intermedio, one of the highlights. Luchero Katana shows astonishing versatility on the castaness in a live performance. The clarity is quite amazing, but so too is her ability to introduce real colour with the most banal percussion instruments. She even manages to slip in perfectly executed crescendo in the closing seconds. As I mentioned the meaning of the word coda earlier on, I hope you'll forgive me for being a bit of a pedant and taking this opportunity to put right an often misunderstood meaning of the word crescendo. You'll hear people talk of a piece of reaching a crescendo. It doesn't do anything of the sort. A crescendo is the gradual increasing loudness of sound. So its culmination is not a crescendo, but the end of it. And with that mini gripe over, I will stand aside.

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