Four Centuries of Great Music January 21, 2024 Camille Saint-Saens

Today on Four Centuries of Great Music I am dedicating the episode to the music of Camille Saint-Saens.  This is in response to the new 2-CD set entitled Saint-Saens just released this past Friday January 19th by pianist Lang Lang. The first CD is focused on the inventive bestiary “The Carnival of the Animals” and the second piano concerto.  And the second combines some of Lang Lang’s  favorite French solo and duet pieces.  Interestingly, Saint-Saens did not allow public performances of his “Carnival of the Animals” during his lifetime with the exception of the piano and cello version of the swan because he felt it would undermine his reputation as a serious composer.  So taking that hint - today we will focus on three serious works of his.

Camille SAINT-SAËNS: Piano Concerto No. 2 in G minor, op. 22

We open with Lang Lang’s performance of the Second piano concerto from this new CD.  It is in 3 movements marked Andante sostenuto, Allegro scherzando and Presto

With Andris Nelsons conducting the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig. from the album Lang Lang: Saint-Saens

Interesting trivia was that the premiere of this work received a very tepid response but the second performance in Leipzig,
with the Gewandhausorchester and with the composer himself as soloist in October 1868, was met with great acclaim and its success led to the international breakthrough of this work.  And it became on of his most popular works during his lifetime.

We will close this first hour of our celebration of the music of Camille Saint-Saëns with the first movement of his Symphony #3 Op 78 “Organ Symphony”.  This movement is marked adagio, allegro moderato, poco adagio.  Here is a performance by Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic with organist Leonard Raver from the album Saint Saens: Symphony No. 3, Piano Concerto No. 4

We will open this second hour of this episode of Four Centuries of Great Music which is celebrating the music of Camille Saint-Saens with the second movement of his Symphony #3 Op 78 “Organ Symphony”.  It is marked Allegro, allegro moderato, maestoso and presto.  Again this is a performance by Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic with organist Leonard Raver from the album Saint Saens: Symphony No. 3, Piano Concerto No. 4
Columbia/Sony


The centerpiece of this hour of Four Centuries of Great music dedicated to the music of Camille Saint-Saens is Saint-Saëns’s Symphony in F major ‘Urbs Roma’.  This work was his prizewinning entry to a competition organized by the Bordeaux Société Ste Cécile, but the work remained unpublished in the composer’s lifetime.

By all rights, Urbs Roma should be Saint Saëns’s Second Symphony – or even, if one counts the delightfully precocious A major work written when he was a 15-year-old student at the Paris Conservatoire, his Third. Composed in 1856 for a competition organzed by Bordeaux’s Saint Cecilia Society, it was not called a symphony because the rules of the competition for some reason excluded symphonies from being submitted.

Urbs Roma may not be as immediately tuneful as the two published symphonies that lie just a few years to either side of it, yet in some ways it’s the most daring and imaginative.  It is most notable for a masterly final movement which, unusually, comprises a theme and variations.

It is in four movements 1st Marked  Largo-Allegro, 2nd marked Molto Vivace, 3rd marked Moderato, assai serioso and the 4th movement is marked poco allegretto - andante con Moto

Here is a performance of Saint-Saëns’s Symphony in F major ‘Urbs Roma’ by the Utah Symphony conducted by Thierry Fischer  from the album Saint-Saëns: Symphony No. 2, Danse macabre & Urbs Roma    Hyperion Records