S2.E59. Meditative Mozart, String Quartet k157, slightly bonkers Strauss, Burlesk Concertante, lighthearted Sullivan Pineapple Poll Suite.

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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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I often wonder where you're listening from and what you're doing as you press play. I heard from one follower recently that he was cycling through the Alps, and another from someone who listens on his walk to work through Central Park in New York City. Why does it matter to me, you might think? Let me explain. All of them are in just a three movement. So each can be listened to in a matter of a quarter of an hour or so. A three movement and musical conversation of just a twelve minutes and a simple key major. I think it may be on the side of this ideally on a park or at very least a place where you can just hit understand somewhere where you can just look and properly taking what you see. Nature in whatever scale, grand or small, a tree, a leaf, a blade of grass, a sky, anything. You'll see what I mean when it comes along. At one level, I can sound melancholic, but I think waterful is more appropriate. It is music by a sixteen-year-old, and yet it has the extraordinary ability to bring so much into perspective. It reminds me of the literary equivalent in the first couple of lines from the poem Leisure by William Henry Davis. What is this life if full of care? But when he was 21, he wrote the closest thing to it, in his concertante for piano and orchestra, titled The Letter. Actually, I'm not sure why it wasn't called a piano concerto, because a piano gets much more than just a prominent part. It's clearly central to the piece. But as to why he didn't write any more, it's possible he may have lost his nerve after the piece was roundly ridiculed as a nonsense by its intended dedicate to Hans von Bullo, whom Strauss had wanted to play its first performance. There are times when it does seem a bit deranged, but von Bullo's beef with it might have had more to do with the fact that he had small hands and found it impossible to play. So the honor went to somebody else in exactly the same way it had done when Straussard asked his horn player Dad to play his first horn concerto, and who declined to do so on the ground that he might do himself a serious injury. The concertante was also renamed from the schedule, meaning a joke, to Bellet, meaning a farm, which is not exactly an upgrade. Anyway, I expect and hope that this might be new to you. It's in one continuous movement, with plenty of nods to Brahms and List, and I mean that literally not in a cockney riding slang way, and has plenty of youthful, playful extravagance in it, as well as Strauss's thrilling orchestration. Which is quite a lineup. But he was also an authority on the operators of Gilbert and Solomon which had taken a hold from an early age as a performer. In 1951, a character compiled a score based on the music of eleven gilded eleven operators for the ballet and a pineapple pole, based on the unusually named Bombo Woman story, in which the main character is someone called I'm not sure why the names were reversed for the music, but a pineapple pole suite does seem to roll off the tongue a little more naturally. Here, fittingly to finish today is the grand finale, incorporating seven themes from the operettas played by the London Philharmonic Orchestra and conducted by the arranger, Charles McCarrass.

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