Saint Charbel

L'auteur confie sa fascination pour saint François d'Assise, personnage historique qui, au coeur du tournant décisif du XIIe au XIIIe siècle, fait bouger la religion, la civilisation et la société. Recueil des textes consacrés au saint par l'historien. …

‘It will be a strange score: people will either not like it at all, or will like it enormously’, prophesied Camille Saint-Saëns a few days before the premiere of Déjanire. The opera, first performed in Monte Carlo on 14 March 1911, is based on incidental music written in 1898 for the Béziers Arena. Fascinated by the subject, the composer soon wanted to give it a second, more ambitious life. He therefore conceived a mythological epic that inspired ‘powerfully evocative music’, according to Gabriel Fauré, who was struck by the impact of the choral writing. Yet the love drama that rends the heroine’s heart engenders wildly romantic duets and culminates in the public immolation of Hercules, set ablaze by the poisoned tunic offered to him by the fallen queen.

In 2019, Alexandre and Jean-Jacques Kantorow’s recording of the last three piano concertos by Camille Saint-Saëns earned the highest praise around the world, including a Diapason d’or de l’année, Editor’s Choice in Gramophone and top marks and recommendations from the leading German web sites Klassik Heute and Klassik.com. The Kantorows’ orchestra of choice was the Finnish ensemble Tapiola Sinfonietta, and they have now returned to Helsinki to record not only Saint-Saëns’ first two concertos, but all of the remaining works for piano and orchestra.

An uncomparable Italian band indeed, Saint Just played a weird mix of Ethnic music and Folk Rock with plenty of Classical passages, where folk atmospheres alternate with organ themes and piano passages all the time but occasionally supported by light electric tunes. The music is soft but rather dark with plenty of acoustic guitars and characterized by Jenny's Sorrenti poetic and haunting vocal lines. While the whole album flows in a relaxed mood,there are surprisingly lots of breaks and alternating ideas in almost every track,which makes ''Saint just'' a demanding release. Organs, pianos and saxes have a major role leading the way and the few electric parts are well-played yet quite smooth. Surprisingly the self-titled number of the album is entirely sung in French by Sorrenti in a theatrical way with a definite beauty surrounding this delicate track.

It is surprising, given the popularity of the repertoire, that all the recordings of Saint-Saëns' complete concertos currently before the public pre-date the CD era and none of them are fully digital. In addition it has never before been possible to obtain all the composer's output for piano and orchestra on only two CDs. For these reasons alone this latest addition to the 'Romantic Piano Concerto' series is likely to become one of the most successful of all. The Gramophone 'Record of the Year' winning team of Stephen Hough and the CBSO are joined by their new principle conductor Sakari Oramo in performances which combine all the elegance required for the Frenchman's music with the utmost bravura. Saint-Saëns himself was a formidable pianist and his rare 1904 (!) 78rpm recording of Africa has until now been matchless; finally in Stephen Hough's performance he has a rival.

It is good to be reminded of du Pré’s vivid, intense and joyful music-making” wrote Gramophone of this pairing of cello concertos by Schumann and Saint-Saëns. “The Schumann has that kind of spontaneous freedom of line that made her account of the Elgar so famous. Her delicacy of response in the slow movement is matched by a romantic flair which carries the outer movements along so admirably. Barenboim directs a sympathetic accompaniment, following her subtle manipulation of rubato with complete understanding.

In this recital, Véronique Gens and Hervé Niquet bring back to life a neglected aspect of France’s Romantic heritage: songs with orchestral accompaniment. Aside from a few pieces by Debussy and Duparc, and Berlioz’s famous Nuits d’été, orchestral mélodies form a virtually forgotten continent. In collaboration with the specialists of the Palazzetto Bru Zane, Alpha Classics now revisits these musical landscapes, taking us from Brittany (Hahn) to Persia, whose beauties Fauré and Saint-Saëns exalt in very different ways. Mélodies by Chausson, Gounod and Dubois and rarely heard instrumental pieces by Massenet, Fauré and Fernand de La Tombelle round out the journey with their musical reveries.

François-Xavier Roth and Les Siècles offer us a double-sided portrait of Saint-Saëns here. On one side, some of the most fascinating symphonic poems of French Romanticism are revealed in all the shimmering timbres of the period. On the other, we rediscover a composer who enjoyed a good laugh (The Carnival of the Animals also returns to it's original colors), when he was not involved in the early days of the cinema, with the very first music ever composed for a film.

Following the success of his first Decca release of solo piano music by Chopin, Liszt, and Ravel, Benjamin Grosvenor demonstrates his aptitude in the concerto repertoire on his second CD, Rhapsody in Blue, recorded with James Judd and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. This is a refreshing change from the usual Tchaikovsky or Rachmaninov concertos one hears from young artists eager to impress, and Grosvenor is clever enough to play not only engaging concertos by Saint-Saëns, Ravel, and Gershwin, but to toss in short bon-bons by these composers to sweeten the program.

Natalie Clein adds a remarkable collection of Saint-Saëns’ music for cello and orchestra to her impressive discography. Clein first came to prominence when she won the BBC Young Musician of the Year award in 1994; it is appropriate that she performs the music of an extraordinary child prodigy.