Episode 6. A full range of Comfort, Romance, Virtuosity, and Playfulness.

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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 Haptinson your ears for his weekly dose of classical music that will enrich your life.

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None of the seems to fit into the Marmite category quite so well as the German Johannes Brahms, who live between 1833 and 1897. I wonder if this is some strange reflection of the way he was received in his own lifetime. Is it astonishing how vilified he was by so many composers whose lives crossed with him at some point? As far as I can see, only two contemporary musicians ever had any time for him Robert and Clara Schumann, whose music will definitely be the subject of a future podcast. And we'll listen to a little bit of Robert later today as well. All of them is a determination to hold on and advance the legacy of the Morocco and classical masters as an arc and later rather than push on interposers new and avenues more adventurous. He would often say to this that on his demise, he would be greatly comforted in knowing that he'd arrived at the right place the first time that he heard without other heavenly host reading him with his piece. And so I wanted to share with you a movement from this requiem, which was a magic hit when it was first performed in 1868 by guaranteeing Brahms' environmental security for the rest of his life. Brahms are not written by the repose of the dead in the traditional Christian Latin, but in German with a word that are from the Lutheran text. And I hope this will encourage you to listen to the rest of it at another time. Because it has as many ethereal melodies and dramatic moments. The moment here is really down the border moment. How lovely are they dwelling? It is because of how my soul requires and yearns for the calls of the Lord. I imagine it is because you can really detect that longing in this recording. Attention which gives away to the calm and joyful knowledge of what those calls were promised. I saw him conduct Betty's record at the Albert Hall a number of years ago, and it must have been a full thirty or forty seconds before anyone dare to applaud at the end. You will have surmised that I am a Brahmi fan. If you aren't, I'm unlikely to convert you. But if you are new to his music, I hope you will warm to its heavenly and romantic nature. He also wrote a few operas, Eugene O'Neill, my personal favourite, which we'll visit another time, and Lapika Dame, the Queen of Savades, being two of the most widely performed. Huge and expansive melodies with plenty of drama, joy, and melancholy. I'm going to play an Aria now from The Queen of the Spades, which I hope will be new to many of you. But beyond the very brief exercise summaries, I'm not going to trouble you with a plot in detail here. It's a tragic pushing the tale about a man called Herman, who has two abiding passions in his life. He is the granddaughter of a countess who has a secret which ensures her exercise cards every time, and Herman is obviously keen to get hold of it. Whoever came up with the expression unlucky in cards lucky in love must have been blitzfully unaware of this pushing tale. Luck runs out on both sides. Especially when it was sung by the bass bother and Dmitry Voroslovski, who died tragically young at the age of 58 in 2017. I was lucky enough to hear him live on a number of occasions and was nothing less than an enraptured. His voice was stunning, and he had this heavy ballasty of charisma, which meant that you just couldn't take your eyes off him. With a note towards the end, which has a beautifully controlled crescendo that has a gradual increase in volume, then followed in the same breath by an equally controlled minuendo, which is its exact opposite what would have left his fellow competitors knowing that they just heard the winner and may have left them a little bit deflated. But another part of the bad year as it happens was one Brenda Fell, which only goes to show that alt winning isn't always such a bad thing. This is Tchaikovsky at his romantic best and in the hands of one of his greatest practitioners. But there are times when you have to separate a man from the music in the same way you might with the one that had Richard Wagner. Besides which, Strauss has wrote some of the loveliest music of the twentieth century and was probably the finest ever composer for the soprano voice. At the tender age of nineteen, the young Richard composed a concerto for the horn, which he hoped his father would play on his first performance. Despite being very accomplished, a senior took one look at the score and decided it was so difficult that if he did play it, he would be in grave danger of doing himself as a serious injury. Dialogues with a woodwind, for example, and the faint is that the tattoo is on the string. It requires the highest level of breathing control, and a demand met comfortably by the late Australian Barry Tuckwall. In this recording with a London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Ita you will find versions which may appear smoother in the sound, but Tuckwall was not one of a caution. This is a gutsy, brassy, no holds a bar performance. And as such, I suspect one which the youth also would have wholeheartedly endorsed. I mentioned Robert Schumann, who lived between eighteen twelve and eighteen fifty-six at the beginning of today's podcast, and I want to give you a sample of his gorgeous music now. Schumann had a life defined by chronic depression, and it can't have been a breeze being married to Clara Vieke after huge protestations by his parents and experiments with countless others, most likely both sexes. Her talents at the keyboard were superior to almost everyone at the time. And Robert's own extraordinary gift at the piano was cut short prematurely by a finger injury. His parents were not in favour of him becoming a musician at all. Lore was the preferred route of his mother. Here is a truly sad, complicated and tormented story, which I can't hope to convey fully here. The marriage itself is a stuff of folklore, a life riddled with self-doubt, drink, and a suicide attempt. It ended in an asylum. But his legacy is music which goes right to the heart, as this little offering will demonstrate. I'll be gobswaged if you don't instantly want to replay it. It's exactly what I did the first time I heard it. I do like the oboe, don't you? I remember being asked by an elderly companion many years ago at a concert. It took me slightly by surprise because I hadn't been especially aware of it during the piece we just heard. And no, actually, if I'm honest, it doesn't feature amongst my favourite instruments ever never had. Altogether too penetrating, which has not stopped at being given some glorious tunes, notably the opening of the second movement of Bronze's violin concerto, prompting one of the great virtuosas of the day, Pablo De Sarasarte, to refuse to play the pizza because he was damned if he was going to stand there for a couple of minutes in silence while somebody else got the best tune. And then I heard this not so long ago, in fact, the second of three romances for oboe and piano, a piece which fits up Hector Berlio's definition of the instrument of perfectly the sounds are suitable for expressing simplicity, gentle happiness, or the grief of a weak soul. There's nothing particularly virtuotic about this, but the melody and the performances by Céline Moinet, one of the world's finest oboes, and Florian Ulig on the piano are very special. Listen to Ulig's left hand, ever present but never in danger of suppressing the oboe. Schumann marks the piece Einfach Inig, meaning simple and intimate accomplished here in spades. The sound of the cuckoo, I accept, is not that unusual, but I'm always relieved to hear its first call, because like the seasons, it's one of life's more pleasurable reminders. My great uncle Victor Heley Hutchinson's a perfect picture as the ability to sing or identify a musical note was identified very early when he sang out the word uh cuckoo, adding uh E immediately afterwards. The German-born George Friedrich Handel moved to London in 1712, and with his remains now in Westminster Abbey, he was never asked to leave. With big hits like The Water Music and The Matasia under his belt, he became a huge success, especially in the field of opera, as well as being a highly accomplished organist who would combine these talents by introducing the premier of each opera with an off-the-cover ditty on the organ. Barely any of his solar compositions for the instrument survive now, but we are left with a group of organ concertos. One of them is known as the Cuckoo and the Nightingale. Handel was a stout, short-tempered man, plagued by ill health for much of his seventy-one bachelor years, including a later blindness which did not nevertheless prevent him from playing or having a good sense of humor. Take the second movement of this piece. A chirpy dialogue between these two birds. Handel tended to outline the main part, but would often leave pages totally blank with the words ad libertum inscribed, requiring a soloist to improvise as best he could. The score is now well established. A silent person is one of our foremost organisters, and the conversation between the birds is clear. It's also a good tune, and he's accompanied by the English concert conducted by Trevor Pinnock.

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Thank you for listening to Perfect Pitch with Nick Keeley 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.