Saint Charbel

Over a remarkably long and illustrious career, Camille Saint-Saëns thrilled audiences around the world as a pianist and organist, shaped the course of musical life in France, and enriched a multitude of genres with some 600 works, all bearing witness to the mastery of his craft. Setting his best-known compositions in their dazzlingly diverse context, this edition invites exploration and discovery. It spans more than a century of recording history, encompassing a host of great instrumentalists, singers, conductors and orchestras, many of them from France. Setting the pace, in performances from as early as 1904, is the composer himself.

Heinrich VIII. als Oper? Da erhofft man sich einen großen Historienschinken - und man bekommt einen großen Historienschinken. Einen der feinsten Güte allerdings. Für seine 1883 uraufgeführte Oper hat der anglophilie Saint-Saëns sogar in der Bibliothek des Buckingham Palace recherchiert - von wo er schließlich die choralartige Leitmelodie für seine schillernde Hauptfigur mitbrachte. Spannend an der mit gediegenstem Handwerk ausgeführten Oper ist, dass sich Komponist und Librettist auch darüber hinaus spürbar für die historischen Hintergründe interessierten.

The debt owed by French music to Saint-Saëns is often overlooked. At a time when many composers saw opera as the only way forward, Saint-Saëns took the supposedly Germanic forms of symphony, sonata and concerto, and transformed them into something idiomatically French. His five concertos for piano and orchestra demonstrate his own skills as a pianist and reflect his admiration for Liszt.

Saint Just was a seventies Italian progressive group but not really reminiscent of the typical Italian sound. Influences from folk, psychedelic and classical can be heard in their music. The most remarkable instrument in their music is the vocals of Jane Sorrenti that float above the music. Her vocal delivery is definitely an acquired taste. The group released only two albums and the line-up is very different in these two albums. In the 1st album there were only three official members of which the saxophonist Robert Fix was not included in the 2nd album. For their 2nd album the remaining members Jane Sorrenti and Antonio Verde (classical guitar, bass) added electric guitarists Tito Rinesi and Andrea Faccenda as well as a drummer Fulvio Maras.

The infinite cosmos of French organ music is Ben van Oosten's realm, and he now has recordd the complete organ works of Camille Saint-Saëns in a sump-tuous box set. He performs on the Cavaillé Coll organ in Ste. Madeleine in Paris, one of the most beautiful instruments of its kind and an organ with a big orchestral sound on which Saint-Saëns himself left his traces for more than two decades.

Les Barbares was premièred at the Paris Opéra (Palais Garnier) in October 1901, having originally been intended for the Roman theatre of Orange, in Provence. Rather than concentrating on bloodshed and slaughter, the plot focuses on the evolution of the relationship between Floria, the chief vestal, and Marcomir, the leader of the Barbarians, with the musical interest of the opera culminating furthermore in their splendid duet at the end of Act II. Saint-Saëns, like Massenet too at that time, shows here his ability to adapt his style to suit his literary inspiration. Les Barbares is in the same vein as Berliozs Les Troyens and contemporary with Faurés Pénélope.

The essence of Camille Saint-Saëns' music comes through perhaps most clearly in his music for solo instrument and orchestra, which exemplifies his elegant combination of melody and conservatory-generated virtuosity. The two cello concertos are here, plus a pair of crowd-pleasing short works for piano and orchestra, and the evergreen Carnival of the Animals, with pianists Louis Lortie and Hélène Mercier joining forces along with a collection of instruments that includes the often-omitted glass harmonica. There are all kinds of attractions here: the gently humorous and not over-broad Carnival, the songful cello playing of Truls Mørk, and the little-known piano-and-orchestra scene Africa, Op. 89, with its lightly Tunisian flavor (sample this final track). But really, the central thread connecting them all is the conducting of Neeme Järvi and the light, graceful work of the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra; French music is the nearly 80-year-old Järvi's most congenial environment, and in this recording, perhaps his last devoted to Saint-Saëns, he has never been better.