Tag Archives: Camille Saint-Saëns

In concert – Summer Music in City Churches: Tier3 Trio @ St Giles Cripplegate

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Tier3 Trio [Joseph Wolfe (violin), Jonathan Ayling (cello), Daniel Grimwood (piano)]

Liszt arr. Saint-Saëns Orpheus
Tchaikovsky arr. Grimwood Andante non troppo (second movement of Piano Concerto no.2 in G major Op.44) (1880)
Arensky Piano Trio no.1 in D minor Op.32 (1894)

St Giles Cripplegate, London
Thursday 13 June 2024, 1pm

Reviewed by Ben Hogwood

‘Love’s Labours’ is the title of this year’s Summer Music in City Churches festival, based opposite the Barbican Hall in St Giles Cripplegate. The ten day-long enterprise is proving ample consolation for the much-missed City of London Festival, which once captivated audiences in the Square Mile for three weeks and offers music of equal range and imagination.

For the second year in succession the Tier3 Trio visited for a lunchtime recital, following up last year’s tempestuous Tchaikovsky Piano Trio with an attractive programme subtitled From Russia with Love. They began with a curiosity, playing Saint-Saëns’ little-known arrangement of Liszt’s symphonic poem Orpheus for piano trio. A highly effective transcription, it retained its dramatic thread in this fine performance, notable for its attention to detail and well-balanced lines when reproducing Liszt’s slow-burning music. Pianist Daniel Grimwood successfully evoked Orpheus’ lyre, while Jonathan Ayling’s burnished cello sound probed in counterpoint to Joseph Wolfe’s violin.

Tier3 was formed during lockdown, and in the same period when he was performing Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto no.2 in Germany, Grimwood realised the suitability of the work’s slow movement for trio. He rightly complemented ‘the extent to which Tchaikovsky was an experimenter in form’, a trait found in many works but at its inventive peak in the second concerto, whose slow movement is in effect a piano trio with orchestra. Here the arrangement was just right – balanced, elegant and fiercely dramatic towards the end. Clarity of line was secured through sensitive pedalling from Grimwood, the trio using the resonant acoustic to their advantage, while the individual cadenzas were brilliantly played.

These two notable curiosities linked beautifully into one of the best-known works of Anton Arensky, his Piano Trio no.1 in D minor. Arensky is not a well-known composer, fulfilling in part an unkind prophecy from his teacher, Rimsky-Korsakov. However that does not mean his music is without merit – far from it, as in his brief life of 45 years he wrote two symphonies, four orchestral suites, a substantial output of piano and high quality chamber music, of which the first piano trio is the pick.

Dedicated to the cellist Karl Davidov, it is equal parts elegy, drama and ballet – with a powerful first movement setting the tone. The balletic second movement Scherzo demands much of the piano, but Grimwood was its equal, sparkling passagework from the right hand dressed with twinkling figures for cello and piano. The emotional centre of the trio was in the slow movement, with a heartfelt tribute to Davidov in Ayling’s first solo, while the finale rounded everything up in a highly satisfying payoff, a return to the first movement’s profound theme capped with an emphatic closing section.

These were very fine performances from a trio at the top of their game, navigating the resonant acoustic of St Giles with power and precision. On this evidence, Rimsky-Korsakov would have had to eat his words!

You can read more about Summer Music in City Churches at the festival website – and you can listen to a Spotify playlist below, containing the music heard in this concert – with the original version of the Tchaikovsky:

Published post no.2,209 – Friday 14 June 2024

In concert – Fazil Say, CBSO / Kazuki Yamada: Prokofiev, Saint-Saëns & Rachmaninoff

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Fazil Say (piano), City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra / Kazuki Yamada

Prokofiev Symphony no.1 in D major Op.25 ‘Classical’ (1916-17)
Saint-Saëns Piano Concerto no.2 in G minor Op.22 (1868)
Rachmaninoff Symphonic Dances Op.45 (1940)

Symphony Hall, Birmingham
Wednesday 4 October 2023

Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse. Picture (c) Fethi Karaduman

French and Russian music has dominated the start of this season by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, this afternoon’s programme continuing the trend with early pieces by Prokofiev and Saint-Saëns heard alongside Rachmaninoff’s last and arguably greatest orchestral work.

Prokofiev consigned two earlier such pieces as juvenilia prior to his Classical Symphony, an infectious refit of Haydn in the early 20th century and calling-card for a career that beckoned in the West. If Kazuki Yamada slightly over-egged the humour in the opening Allegro, as too a rather self-conscious take on the Gavotte, the limpid phrasing of the intervening Larghetto was as disarming as was the interplay of wind and strings in the Finale – a reminder, here as throughout, that such musical directness should not be mistaken for mere technical facility.

This could be said of the Second Piano Concerto that Saint-Saëns unleashed on an evidently nonplussed Parisian audience half-a-century earlier. True, the conflation of Bach – given a makeover worthy of Alexander Siloti – with Liszt affords the opening movement an almost makeshift design, but Fazil Say took it firmly in hand from a surging ‘chorale-prelude’ to a tersely decisive coda. A pity his pianism was not applied a little more deftly in the ensuing intermezzo, its ingratiating poise smothered by an almost hectoring insistence, but the final Presto suited this most demonstrative of present-day virtuosi to a tee – its perpetuum mobile undertow maintained with unflagging resolve through to those almost brutal closing chords. Credit to Yamada for enhancing the total effect with his astute and precise accompaniment.

Say, as much composer as pianist, responded to the applause with his Black Earth – a study in sonority alluding to the golden-age of Turkish balladry as well as the Saz (a Turkish lute) in a mood of sombre fatalism which, unlike his orchestral epics, did not outstay its welcome.

The CBSO has given frequent performances over the decades of Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances, but none so incendiary. Not that there was anything overly powerhouse in Yamada’s conception of an initial piece whose outer sections felt trenchant in their energy, with the alto saxophone melody at its centre eloquently given by Kyle Horch and the coda rendered with melting grace. Nor was any lack of suavity in the central piece, its underlying waltz motion poised on a knife-edge of sardonic humour rightly given its head in the hectic closing pages.

Yamada had the measure, too, of the last piece with its dramatic introduction and impulsive continuation, but it was in the lengthy central episode this reading really came into its own – the composer creating music of an intoxicating expression via subtleties of harmonic nuance or textural shading rather than any defining melodic line. From here, impetus was seamlessly restored to a climactic emergence of the Dies irae plainchant then surged on to the explosive closing gesture that might have resounded longer had the audience not unreasonably erupted.

Yamada responded with Lezginka from Khachaturian’s ballet Gayane. An exhilarating close to an afternoon as began for early arrivals with what sounded like a medley from a mid-1970s children’s TV show on the first-floor performance space: it could only be here in Birmingham.

You can read all about the 2023/24 season and book tickets at the CBSO website. Click on the artist names for more information on pianist Fazil Say and conductor Kazuki Yamada

In concert – Thomas Trotter, CBSO / Pierre Bleuse: Saint-Saëns ‘Organ’ Symphony; Ravel, Poulenc & Holmès

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Thomas Trotter (organ, above), City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra / Pierre Bleuse

Ravel Le Tombeau de Couperin (1914-17, orch. 1919)
Poulenc Organ Concerto in G minor FP93 (1934-8)
Holmès La Nuit et l’Amour (1888)
Saint-Saëns Symphony no.3 in C minor Op.78 ‘Organ’ (1885-6)

Symphony Hall, Birmingham
Wednesday 20 September 2023 (2.15pm)

Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse

It hardly seems 40 years since Thomas Trotter took on the post of Birmingham City Organist in succession to the venerable George Thalben-Ball, and it was good to see his local orchestra marking the occasion with a programme which featured two staples from the organ repertoire.

Some 85 years on and it might be hard to imagine just how radical (or, better still, subversive) Poulenc’s Organ Concerto was through its juxtaposing elements both serious and populist in a continuous sequence that comes together precisely because of this stylistic incongruity. Not that Trotter betrayed any such doubts in what proved a tautly cumulative reading; aspects of the Baroque and Classical colliding with a sombre if never wantonly earnest Romanticism in which strings melded seamlessly with the soloist while timpani underpinned climactic points. Pierre Bleuse ensured a steady gathering of tension over the lengthy central span of slow(ish) music, with the final stages making the most of that music-hall element as makes the fateful ensuing recessional then baleful closing cadence more decisive in its stark emotional impact.

Organ transcription of Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin is not unknown, but this afternoon’s performance was of the composer’s familiar orchestral version. Bleuse (below) conveyed the reticent elation of the Prélude, and while his expressive emphases made the Forlane overly studied in its knowingness, the wistful elegance of the Minuet sounded as disarming as was Yurie Aramaki’s oboe playing. Nor was any lack of poise in the central sections of the Rigaudon, even if Bleuse’s slightly stolid tempo in those either side sacrificed some of the music’s elan.

Composer, artist and feminist Augusta Holmès left a substantial output whose ambition may outstrip its attainment but includes such gems as La Nuit et l’Amour. Originally an interlude in her symphonic ode Ludus pro patria, it had established itself as an autonomous item well before becoming a staple of late-night music programmes – its canny amalgam of sensuous harmonies and heady lyricism recalling such contemporaries as Massenet and Godard, albeit with her engagingly personal twist which communicated itself readily in this performance.

Saint-Saëns was guarded with his assessment of Holmès, but his remark on her ‘flamboyant orchestration’ feels no less applicable to the Organ Symphony such as constitutes his greatest orchestral achievement and of which the City of Birmingham Symphony has given numerous memorable outings. While not among these, this account still left little to be desired – Bleuse launching the first part with keen expectancy before steering a purposeful if slightly dogged course through the ensuing Allegro. Seated up high at the organ console (rather than adjacent to the orchestra as with the Poulenc), Trotter made the most of the Adagio’s luminous timbral registrations which complemented the similarly burnished orchestration, while there was no lack of vigour or vivacity in the ‘scherzo’ section that bursts in at the start of the second part.

It is easy to make the ‘finale’ overbearing in its grandiloquence, but Trotter resisted any such temptation – he and Bleuse conveying the impetus and excitement of this music as it headed through passages of chorale and fugue toward a peroration as satisfying as it was irresistible.

You can read all about the 2023/24 season and book tickets at the CBSO website. Click on the artist names for more information on organist Thomas Trotter and conductor Pierre Bleuse

In concert – Alban Gerhardt, CBSO / Roderick Cox: Ravel, Saint-Saëns & Bartók

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Alban Gerhardt (cello), City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra / Roderick Cox

Ravel Ma mère l’Oye – suite (1910, orch. 1911)
Saint-Saëns Cello Concerto no.1 in A minor Op.33 (1872)
Bartók Concerto for Orchestra BB123 (1943, rev. 1945)

Symphony Hall, Birmingham
Thursday 16 February 2023 (2.15pm)

Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse

This afternoon’s concert by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra brought a judicious programme that not only looked effective on paper but worked well in practice, juxtaposing characteristic works by Ravel and Bartók alongside a favourite concerto from Saint-Saëns.

Although the extended ballet was championed by Simon Rattle during his CBSO tenure, the original five items constituting Ravel’s Mother Goose suite (the Prelude was included on the programme but (rightly) not in this performance) constitutes an attractive sequence and one that played to the orchestra’s strengths. Roderick Cox brought out the serene poignancy of Sleeping Beauty’s Pavane as fully as the winsome poise of Hop-o’-My-Thumb, with its delectable playing from woodwind. Neither was the piquant humour in Laideronnette, Empress of the Pagodas undersold, nor the stealthy interplay of gentility and earthiness in Dialogue of Beauty and the Beast. Initially a little muted in its rapture, The Fairy Garden built towards a finely sustained apotheosis whose unforced ecstasy was much in evidence.

Saint-Saëns has long enjoyed a following in Birmingham – not least his First Cello Concerto, which this reviewer first heard played by CBSO with the redoubtable Paul Tortelier almost a half-century ago. Evidently no stranger to this piece, Alban Gerhardt launched into the first of its three continuous movements with due purposefulness; pointing up the formal ingenuity as the composer interposes between what are nominally the exposition and development of a sonata design a ‘minuetto’ where soloist and muted strings render the principal themes at an oblique remove. The relatively extended final section can risk feeling diffuse, but Gerhardt’s focus brought a natural sense of intensification then resolution prior to the decisive close. The soulful opening Dialogo from Ligeti’s early Solo Cello Sonata provided an apposite encore.

A staple of the modern repertoire in almost as short a time as it took to be composed, Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra is a sure test for any such ensemble and one that the CBSO met with alacrity on this occasion. Setting a steady if never inflexible tempo for the Introduzione, Cox drew its contrasts of musing uncertainty and impulsive dynamism into a tensile and cohesive whole. Hardly less effective was the genial succession of duets in Giuoco delle coppie, set in relief by a brass chorale which makes for one of its composer’s most affecting inspirations.

Its sombreness marginally underplayed in its opening stages, the Elegia lacked nothing in eloquence at its climaxes or in its regretful closing bars, then a juxtaposing of folksong with Léhar and/or Shostakovich in the Intermezzo interrotto made for a heady while meaningful amalgam. It might not have followed-on attacca, but the Finale was otherwise the highlight of the reading – Cox as attentive to the music’s energetic and lyrical elements as to a central fugato whose initial fanfares return to cap the work, and this performance, in joyous abandon.

Born in Macon (Georgia) and currently based in Berlin, Cox is a fluent and assured presence such as helped make this an auspicious debut. The CBSO returns next week for an appealing programme with Ilan Volkov, featuring Isata Kanneh-Mason in Prokofiev’s Third Concerto.

You can read all about the 2022/23 season and book tickets at the CBSO website. Click on the artist names for more on Roderick Cox and Alban Gerhardt.

Online Concert: Christian Poltéra & Kathryn Stott @ Wigmore Hall – Prokofiev & Chopin

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Christian Poltéra (cello, above), Kathryn Stott (piano, below)

Prokofiev Cello Sonata in C major Op.119 (1949)
Chopin Cello Sonata in G minor Op.65 (1845-6)

Wigmore Hall, Monday 13 February 1pm

by Ben Hogwood

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_GSCarZNqw

Christian Poltéra and Kathryn Stott are a long-established duo who have provided us with a richly rewarding discography including works by Fauré, Saint-Saëns, Barber and Schumann. Their encounters with Russian music appear to have been less frequent to date, and it was good to hear their poised account of one of the form’s most popular works. Ukrainian-born Prokofiev wrote his sonata, a late work, for Mstislav Rostropovich, who had impressed him with his larger than life playing. It is the first of a late burst of works for the instrument, including the Sinfonia Concertante, Solo Cello Sonata and Concertino.

Poltéra began the sonata with a solemn intonation on the lowest register of the cello, emphasising the ‘grave’ aspect of Prokofiev’s tempo marking rather than going for an epic sound. This thoughtful approach bore fruit in the slower sections, and with Stott an attentive partner there was plenty to enjoy in Prokofiev’s baleful writing, and impressive clarity in the more expansive passages.

The second movement danced attractively, tapping into Prokofiev’s ballet credentials, with some enjoyable exchanges between the two, if not always making the most of the composer’s frequently humourous asides. The third movement sang out more, Poltéra projecting further without losing any of his admirable control or intonation, and Stott getting to the heart of Prokofiev’s combination of percussive cut and thrust and soft-centred lyricism.

Chopin’s Cello Sonata came as something of a surprise to his fellow composers in the mid-1840s. Written for the French cellist Auguste Franchomme, it is a substantial work, which unsurprisingly asks a great deal of the pianist in a full-bodied, almost orchestral role.

Poltéra it was who led the first movement most impressively, with a consistently attractive sound singing subtly but meaningfully. Technically he is a superb cellist, with tone unflinching, but praise should be levelled at Stott’s ability to bring beautiful phrasing to even the most congested piano writing. The searching legato theme in the second movement was a case in point for the cellist, beautifully played with flowing piano figures. The lovelorn third movement was tinged with sadness, finishing lost in thought. The last movement showed determination to break from this soul searching, looking outward as it powered through to a major key finish.

This was an excellent performance, ideally balanced and capturing the right balance of regret and resolve – and was balanced by the encore, Saint-Saëns’ Romance in F major Op.42. A Monday lunchtime treat.

For more livestreamed concerts from the Wigmore Hall, click here