Saint

The most ambitious work by 20th-century French master Olivier Messiaen, Saint Francis is also his most all-embracing. He spent nearly a decade creating the opera, which not only encapsulates the composer's abiding Catholic faith but draws on a lifetime of musical discovery and brings together the elements of Messiaen's far-ranging, rich vocabulary: birdsong and nature as a source for music, Eastern modes, complex rhythms derived from ancient Greek poetry and Hindu talas, plainsong, and percussive gamelan-like sonorities, to list a few of the most salient. Messiaen chose Francis for operatic representation as the saint "most like Christ" and wrote his own libretto, using the gentle poetry of the Fioretti.

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 its original colours!), when he was not involved in the early days of the cinema, with the very first music ever composed for a film!

Ensemble Musique Oblique, Saint-Saens - Le Carnaval des animaux, Quintet Op14, L'Assassinat Op128
Harmonia Mundi | 2 juin 2000 | Classical | APE+CUE | 3% Recovery | 242 MB | Covers+Booklet | 73'38"

Le bestiaire d’un enfant du siècle.
Un lion, des gallinacées, un éléphant, des tortues, un coucou, un cygne… et des pianistes. Ce joyeux inventaire ne saurait faire oublier que Saint-Saëns fut avec L’Assassinat du duc de Guise (1908) l’un des premiers compositeurs pour le cinéma.

The bestiary of a child of the century.
A lion, cocks and hens, an elephant, tortoises, a cuckoo, a swan… and pianists. This merry parade reminds us that with L’Assassinat du duc de Guise Saint-Saëns was one of the earliest composers of film-music.