Episode 3: Tenderness, High Spirits, 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. A 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

We often turn to music of different kinds depending on our mood. And we'll discuss that a little in the future podcast. But when it comes to music of comfort, Bach so often fills a brief. It hardly seems possible that Bach is another of those composers who divides opinion. I suspect the limericks in 1884 weren't quite as amusing as they are nowadays, but this one appeared in an edition of the Musical Herald, and sometimes he is attracted. A fugue with no tune, he thought it was a boon, and so he wrote 17,000 or more. Beethoven put it more wisely, describing him as the immortal god of harmony. Many musicians will tell you that they start their day by warming up with Bach, not by way of some regular exercise routine, but because his music is setting at the very foundation of everything that follows. If you're practicing the Elgar Chicken channel, for example, you're unlikely to dive in without a first thing. It's a bit like going to the range. You don't start with a driver and a driver's magnet out of the park without having perfected much. You may not get quite as much a lot of that. You don't need to be the leader, even if it might have appreciated. When it comes, I use an iron towards the end. And if you remain on an end concentrate on love because however is the one thing that we all need. Time to lighten things up a bit and move east to another great tune smith, Antonin Devorjak. Written in the 1880s, these two Slavonic dances form part of a larger set. It's quite possible that you'll recognize the tunes, but what you may not know is that they were originally composed of four hands on the piano before being orchestrated. And it's the piano version we're going to listen to now. Devorjak, like Hubert, also came from a larger family. He was one of fourteen children, eight of whom survived infancy. But that's still quite an endurance for his poor mother. His father was an innkeeper, which might go some way to explain that. The young Devorjak was expected to follow in his father's footsteps, but the boy had different ideas, largely spurred by his champion Johannes Brahms, who persuaded him to spread his wings and leave his hometown of Prague to go to the US. But classical music wasn't really a thing yet. The huge success of his new world symphony has changed that almost overnight. In time, as you come to recognize the styles of different composers, there will be occasions when you just may not be sure. But I found that a fairly good rule of thumb is that if the tune is a full of charm, the Vorjack is often a good guess. Here's why, and I hope you'll agree. Later he was persuaded to orchestrate these two dances, but I think they sound every bit as rich and colourful on the two pianos. The first has a melancholic charm, and the second is a good deal more lively. What I love about these recordings, especially the first one, is the way that the two parts blend so well, despite occasionally having very different approaches. The young Yu Jar Wang is at the top end of the keyboard, and the older statesman Andres Schif is at the bottom, and you'll notice how well his slightly playful attitude does nothing to undermine the lush melody being played higher up. No other symphony in the entire repertoire can hold a candle to its unbridled joy from the first note to last. By the standards of the day, it was a marathon work. Although having the conventional four movements, the performance will take a minimum of 45 minutes and can last up to an hour if all the repeats are respected, often leaving players exhausted. And that was certainly the experience on the first rehearsal. Many of them apparently just laughed, although the truth of it is that they were anything but amused as it was Rinder playing. And in the final movement, the violinist took some umbrage at having to play a second fiddle, as it were, to the brass and the woodwind, which I think is easy to detect. It was Robert Schumann who discovered it and persuaded Mendelssohn to conduct its first performance in 1839, more than ten years after Jupiter died. Jupiter doesn't disappoint with no risk of boredom. It's impossible to imagine without exhilarating music.

SPEAKER_01 32:14

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.