S2.E105. A soothing Prelude by Vaughan Williams, Schubert's Shepherd on the Rock, hitting the high Cs with Donizetti, Tchaikovsky July, and Mendelssohn Reformation Symphony finale.ls

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.

Hello again, wherever and whenever I find you listening. I continue to be astonished at the reach of this podcast. The last episode reached over 40 countries within 48 hours, 80% outside the UK. I have no marketing team and I'm not the greatest self-promoter. So I really would appreciate your help if you enjoy our time together. It's so easy now. All you have to do is pop in a few addresses in one of the links below the episode notes and the job is done. I rely solely on word of mouth and this kind of recommendation. So if you haven't done it already, I would be very grateful. And there's also a prize drawer, which is open until the end of the year by way of a thank you for your trouble. I can't ever state my appreciation. It makes a huge difference. It was unashamedly a propaganda work designed to persuade the then neutral United States to participate in the Second World War. It's unlikely there was any direct link between the two, the ultimate catalyst, of course, being the bombering of Pearl Harbor later in the year. But the soundtrack was composed by Ray Vaughan Williams. Even if you don't know the prelude to the Forty Ninth Parallel, you would still, I'm sure, instinctively assume that it was written for the big screen. It has an instantly cinematic feel about it. And these few minutes show he had a real gift for the big campus. The prelude to the 49th parallel, released in the United States as The Invaders, is played here by the Royal Northern Symphony, conducted by Richard A. Cox. It's been suggested by some that it wasn't good enough for the piano or the violin, and therefore not in a position to demonstrate his prowess on a public platform. I'm not sure that's necessarily a prerequisite, although doubtless it helps the likes of Beethoven Mozart, Maninoff and Chopin. But he was far from a shoddy pianist. So I think we must just assume he was more comfortable with limiting his output on a larger scale to symphonies and mass while really excelling in every field at the chamber level. This song though, The Shepherd on the Rock, is a perfectly lovely dialogue with not just a piano, but also no clarinet as well. Although it was written expressly for a soprano voice, exactly about a shepherd standing on a rock staring wistfully into the distance and lamenting a lot of love. She would easy shift from major to minor keys totally the mood of the singer without needing to know the words. First you get the setting of the scene, then a very obvious yearning, and finally a realization that all will be well. I've acknowledged in the past that some people may not like the word salvation, but that is how so much of his music feels to me. And if you're not happy with salvation, you surely have aspiration that we can. And one of the words that you need as well. In reality, of course, what we're seeing is something close to perfection, a culmination of year-in, year-out hard work to achieve something which in the end appears effortless and which is anything but my particular loves of cricket, golf, and tennis bring to mind three of the most graceful plays in their art. So Vivian Richards, Rihanna Ballasteros and Roger Federer, respectively. All of them had an air of ease about them, which belied the efforts behind their accomplishments. And this is why when you hear brief aria like this, you might think at first, yeah, okay, that sounds straightforward enough until I actually point out to you what's being done here. Donald said he's a two-act opera, La Fille du Regiment, daughter of the regiment, little more than a romp about a girl, Marie, who is brought up by some soldiers after being rescued on the battlefield. She falls in love with a local peasant, Tony, who joins the regiment for the sole purpose of trying to get lots of status to marry her. But her mother turns out to be a marchioness, and she's not going to have any of this nonsense, so whips her off with the intention of fixing her off with a much more respectable suit. And the regiment happens to be passing through its opera after all, and arranged marriages on the horizon. But the Marquis swayed by the younger lovers and gives them out that way. So that's a very quick exclamation of the plot. Now back to the Aria. When Tony is expected to join the regiment, he things of his joy that this will enable him to marry Marina. It involves getting no less than nine top T. If you want to try and adjust how difficult that is, start from middle C out of the middle C now. Dom that's a middle C and then single scale from there to the next T. And then when you get there, try going out from there, singing the same scale, and see how far you get to the next T. It doesn't matter if you're a man or a woman, the ladies might get a little further, I suspect. But I doubt you will reach the top. The nickname for this aria being appropriately the Everest. The difficulty is compounded by the fact that in the Aria, the tenor doesn't get the luxury of climbing the scale, which might make it a fractionally easier to leap from one node to another eight nodes higher and land on it perfectly. Now you can see what I mean about how something like this in the hands of Juan Diego Flores seems effortless. Because it does. But it's actually an astonishing feat and another reminder of an extraordinary thing the human voice is. And that, as you heard, was a live performance adding another dimension to the artistry with no safety net in the form of another taking industry. It's less than a couple of minutes. Combined the weight of the machinery.