Prokofiev Overture on Hebrew Themes, Tchaikovsky Sleeping Beauty, Beethoven Pathetique and Eroica.

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Welcome back to Perfect Pitch with Nick Healy Hutchinson and his fresh approach to the world of classical music. Whether you're an expert or a beginner, old or young, Perfect Pitch has something for everyone.

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Soon after Prokofiev moved to the United States in 1918, a Russian group, which had also fled there, commissioned him to write a rather strange work. Although the title is Overture on Hebrew Themes, the piece is scored for an unusual collection of instruments, just a string quartet with a clarinet and a piano. It seems that Brokofyov was not crazy on the work himself, but I think it's got a lot going for it. In its nine minutes, there's even a brief moment when it sounds like a much larger group is playing. The Jewish melodies are jumped in here mainly by the clarinet and the cello are easy enough to spot. And it's amazing quite how much it acts in. Moments of lushness on the strings, charming passages or individual instruments of melancholy and momentum. Some of the bars are just the kind of stuff which you can easily find in the middle of a model symphony. So I think it's very far from being mundane. It turns out that Bokofiev was persuaded to come up with a full orchestrated version. So I gave this a listen as well. But I couldn't see that it added anything to the intimacy of the smaller group. And after digging a bit more, I was just a little pleased to see that Prokofiev felt exactly the same way. So here is Prokofiev's overture on Hebrew themes played in its original chamber version in a live performance in Tel Aviv, with Yevgeny who hood in on the clarinet and Martha Arginich on the piano. He need not have worried. Although Tchaikovsky was never aware of its weather success, as he died only three years later. Without any cuts, of which there are now many, the full ballet would take nearly four hours to perform. So you can imagine that Tchaikovsky might have been a little underwhelmed when he would come into the Imperial box after its premiere to be told by the Tsar that it was very nice. At its heart is the story of good triumphing over evil, in the parts of the lilac fairy in the good corner and cutabot in the bad corner, with an innocent princess in the middle who is working by an innocent prince after a 100-year sleep. It has some psychosity's loveliest music. And these few minutes of a panorama perform an entre act in Act 2, which one of my arts describes quite perfectly as the better piece of theme-changing music I know. It's played here by the Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Ricardo Muti. In my younger days, I was lucky enough to have piano lessons. But I never got very far with my grades because I couldn't get to grips with the musical theory, which you need to advance at a high level. So in my 30s, I decided to embark on a course of six, one-hour lessons. When you do this as an adult and you're paying for it, it's because you want to, and your approach is therefore completely different. When I turned up at the piano studio set up by concert peanus Richard Merrick, the first thing he asked me to do was to play something to see where the pitch is teaching. Was I in the twinkle twinkle little star category or Ragman enough? Somewhere in between was the answer, as I began to play the second movement of Beethoven's pattern to sonata. Like all Beethoven's pieces, it's not quite as easy as it sounds. But I was just about to tackle a slightly trickier passage when Richard tapped me on the elbow. You know, he said, I think you could fool a lot of people, that you're really quite quite a good pianist, and then pointed out the liberties I had taken with a piece. I don't think I was that wide of the mark, but nor was it a patch on this the playing of Vladimir Askenazi. There's only really one way to follow that, and it is a stick with Beethoven. I referred in the past to how his third symphony, The Heroica, chained symphonic writing forever, not just in its form, but also its length. It's probably the one defining work which marks the move away from the classical period to the romantic. You may remember from a previous podcast how I referred to the last movement of Mozart's final symphony, the Jupiter, as being a master stroke of construction. But Beethoven takes us to a new level in the finale of his third symphony. There are no less than ten variations, and if you really listen, you can hear how a relatively simple beginning builds to an increasing and highly sophisticated complexity. Layer upon layer result in a couple of monumental fugal passages before a brief respite and a triumphant surge to the finish. Every time I listen to this, however familiar it is, its pure genius never fails to leave me completely bewildered with excitement.

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