Saint Saens le Carnaval Des Animaux

Les deux oeuvres sont des classiques des concerts pour enfants qui connaissent un même succès mon­dial : le conte musical « Pierre et le loup » de Prokofiev et « Le Carnaval des animaux » de Camille Saint-Saëns, que ce dernier a décrit – probablement avec un clin d’oeil – comme une « Grande fantaisie zoologique ». Est-ce que l’essentiel est ainsi dit ? Pas du tout. Car la question se pose de savoir pourquoi les adultes appré­cient autant que les enfants l’histoire du brave Pierre et du méchant loup. Cela a sans doute à voir avec la géniale musique de Prokofiev. Il faut en outre se sou­venir que Saint-Saëns a composé son « Carnaval » pour un concert privé à domicile, c›est-à-dire pour le divertissement d’adultes. Et ces derniers ne pou­vaient apparemment pas se retenir de rire, si bien que le compositeur a soudain pris peur et a strictement interdit la publication de son oeuvre charmante, crai­gnant que ses oeuvres sérieuses ne soient dès lors plus prises au sérieux. D’une certaine façon, on lui a donné raison : en termes de popularité auprès des jeunes et moins jeunes, aucune autre oeuvre de Saint-Saëns ne peut rivaliser avec le « Carnaval des animaux ».

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.

Sweet Saint-Saëns and wicked Apollinaire may be empires apart, but their hilarious animal portraits in Le Carnaval des Animaux and Le Bestaire ooze the same satirical genius. Belgian composer Piet Swerts translated the evident musicality in the Bestiaire poems into real melodies, and he rearranged Le Carnaval for clarinet, strings and piano. The acclaimed Roeland Hendrikx Ensemble fuses both zoos in an unparalleled chamber-musical Animal Farm which showcases the grand façades but also the foibles of the normal, and not so normal creatures that populate it.

The two sonatas for cello and piano by Camille Saint-Saëns stand as bookends to what was an impressively long compositional career spanning more than seven decades. Much of Saint-Saëns' music for cello, including these two sonatas, has been dismissed as inferior and is rarely performed or recorded. Only the first cello concerto, often played by advanced students of the instrument, remains a common occurrence on disc or stage.

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.

Mischa Maisky's rich, velvety tone and brilliant technique give all the works here an arresting, memorable quality. The recordings, too, are full and resonant and, in the concerto, the Orpheus players sound as passionately involved as the soloist; the tuttis lose all feeling of formality. (By comparison, the LSO for Isserlis lack intensity.) I was swept along by Maisky's performance until the third movement, where he takes the main theme very slowly, more Andante than Allegro moderato, then speeds up substantially for the virtuoso passages.