Lars Vogt (1970-2022) early recordings collected here provide a document of an artist who always remained authentic, both to himself and to music. Lars Vogt never sought absolute truth, but truthfulness instead meant all the more to him. The man and the artist were always very close, never currying favour and never detached from the world. He was, instead, open and natural. "It's incredibly gratifying when you notice that you can perhaps light a little spark, a little flame for music in people, and when music helps you to find the path to your own soul."

The collaborative efforts, the mutual emulation and inspiration of Sir Antonio Pappano and the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome have spanned 18 years, led to one of the world's greatest and most versatile virtuoso ensembles and to acclaimed live and studio recordings showcasing an eclectic selection of symphonic and choral music. Their repertoire features already legendary performances of Verdi's Requiem and Quattro pezzi sacri. In addition, their recording of Bruckner's 8th Symphony features here for the very first time! This box brings together all the recordings that the British conductor Sir Antonio Pappano (b.1959) made with the Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in the years from 2005 to 2022 for Warner Classics.

His exceptional touch and sense of phrasing, his deep and personal understanding of the most varied repertoires, or even the legendary trio he formed together with Jacques Thibaud and Pablo Casals, made Alfred Cortot the greatest pianist of his time. Master of many disciples, notably the brilliant Dinu Lipatti, Samson François and Clara Haskil, Cortot also had a lasting influence on the Russian piano school through Samuil Feinberg and Heinrich Neuhaus, the latter himself being the revered teacher of Sviatoslav Richter.

All of the recordings in this set had undergone careful sound restoration in 2012, in order to respect as closely as possible the original sound. The remastering was carried out under the expert control of Mr. Guthrie Luke, a former disciple of Alfred Cortot who attended many recording sessions by Cortot. These recordings do not represent a "complete" edition: the many rolls engraved by the artist for Duo-Art, Aeolian and Pleyela labels have not been reproduced here, most of them doubling the 78-RPM repertoire. The first recordings are acoustic; and the ones with an electric microphone appeared as early as 1926.

This is the second album of the Saint-Saens series, with young talents?. All recordings were made with the ORF Radio-Symphonieorchester Wien, conducted by Howard Griffiths. The repertoire inludes: Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 2 in G minor op. 22, Morceau de Concert in F minor op. 94, Romance in F major op. 36, Romance in E major op. 67 and Suite for Violoncello and Orchestra op. 16b?

Idil Biret's first concerto recording

Introducing Leia Zhu, a remarkable wunderkind on the violin, in her highly anticipated first release of an 8-album series dedicated to the captivating solo concertos of Saint-Saens. This album is a celebration of talent and artistry, showcasing the extraordinary capabilities of one of today's most promising young musicians. Delve into the virtuosic and challenging repertoire of Saint-Saens, featuring his Violin Concertos No. 1 & 2, along with the enchanting Introduction et Rondo Capriccioso, Op. 28 and the lively Havanaise, Op. 83. Leia Zhu's interpretations bring a fresh perspective to these masterpieces, blending technical prowess with emotional depth. Join us as we embark on this exciting musical journey through Saint-Saens' works, and witness the emergence of a new star in the classical music world.

Classical Music

I enjoyed this new Sony coupling of Saint-Saëns and Wieniawski concertos very much indeed. They are both highly rewarding works, well crafted in the best sense. Their special charm is that the quality of the invention and the manner in which the themes are discussed is exactly right for the music's modest scale. Julian Rachlin has their full measure and continually beguiles us with the spontaneous melodic flow. He is a Lithuanian prodigy (beginning his concert career at the age of ten!) and is utterly in command of the galaxy of colour his instrument can create in that special way that seems to come so readily and easily to Jewish fiddlers, when they are so naturally gifted. Not for a single bar throughout this music is his virtuosity displayed for its own sake: it is always put at the service of the two composers. The Saint-Saëns was taken from a live concert, although this is not made clear in the presentation material. Both concertos were recorded in the Mann Auditorium and there are subtle differences in the sound, although the balance is basically excellent throughout. In Saint-Saëns the audience absorbion cushions the orchestral textures, but also makes the solo image warmer, more seductive; in the Wieniawski the orchestra] focus is fresher, the body of the string tone has more tangibility, and the violin is made to 'stand tall', more positively up front. But Julian Rachlin's playing can take any amount of scrutiny and in the live performance, where there were no chances for retakes, he is just as technically assured as when recording under studio conditions. Mehta, too, is on top form and so is the orchestra.

The Saint-Saëns comes first and has many delights to offer. The first movement has a splendidly passionate lyrical impulse and the Andantino is sheer delight: it has one of the composer's most delicious inspirations, a siciliano which is relished here by one and all (including us). Note Rachlin's gentle reprise of the lovely lyrical theme, surrounded by delicate touches of woodwind colour at 4'53" and again his re-presentation at 6'41", high up and exquisite. This is what fine fiddling is all about. But the performance reaches its peak in the splendid finale, the longest movement, which has wit and fire and a memorable chorale melody thrown in for good measure. It appears ethereally on the violins at 3'55" (Mehta and his orchestra wonderfully persuasive); then at 4'18" the soloist relishes its beauty. When the brass finally get their teeth into it (843") they let rip with real gusto, and then the soloist admonishes them with a gentle riposte which includes a disarming pianissimo echo. The sinuously flowing opening of the Wieniawski is beautifully and naturally moulded by the orchestra, with fine contributions from the principal oboe and solo horn, and when the soloist arrives the music's rhapsodic feeling continues most pleasingly. The second subject is beguiling enough when it first appears, but at its reprise (6'14") Rachlin's 50110 voce playing makes one's toes curl with pleasure. At 1135" the orchestra's principal clarinet shows what he is made of in the preparation for the glorious Andante, where the violin enters gently but with a simmering, sultry tone. The chimerical finale is full of joy and has the lightest touch from all concerned. I have played this record a lot and shall return to it with much pleasure. Not all music has to move mountains like Beethoven's Eroica.

-- Gramophone [12/1992]

SAINT-SAËNS: PIANO CONCERTOS 3

STRING QUARTETS

Classical Music

SOMM Recordings is pleased to present Music for Two Pianos by the French virtuoso pianist and composer, Camille Saint-Saens (1835 - 1921), whose output for solo and duo pianists totals almost 200 compositions. The programme on this release comprises original works for two pianos alongside selections transcribed by Saint-Saens from his orchestral pieces. The featured pianists, Artur Pizarro and Ludovico Troncanetti, made their piano duo debut in Lisbon in 2023 with a recital featuring the repertoire on this album.�The artists share a love of performing two-piano and four-hands repertoire, and they have plans to continue their collaboration with further projects on stage and in the studio. The renowned Portuguese pianist, Artur Pizarro, winner of the Leeds International Piano Competition amongst others, performs internationally as a recitalist, chamber musician, and soloist with the world's leading�orchestras and conductors.�The Italian pianist, Ludovico Troncanetti, is a graduate of the Milan Conservatory and is actively involved in reviving the works of the Russian pianist and composer Anton Rubinstein. The recital opens with Saint-Saens' transcription of Le Rouet d'Omphale (Omphale's Spinning-Wheel), the most famous of his four symphonic poems inspired by Greco-Roman mythology. Both this work and the Marche heroique had their premiere in the original version for two pianos, the march seeming to presage the war that broke out between France and Prussia in July 1870. The first and most substantial of Saint-Saens' original two-piano works is a set of Variations on a Theme of Beethoven, based on the Trio section of the Minuet from Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 18, the Hunt. The eight variations plus a fugue, presto, and coda require considerable ensemble skill from the pianists to pull off. From 1886-the year of the Organ Symphony and The Carnival of the Animals-comes Saint-Saens' tribute to Chopin, whom he had passionately admired since he was a student. Saint-Saens vividly evokes the spirit of the Polonaise without actually quoting any of Chopin's own works inspired by the national dance of his native Poland. Saint-Saens frequently wintered in North Africa; in fact he died in Algiers in December 1921. During an 1889 trip to Las Palmas in Northern Africa, he began composing his Scherzo for two pianos. It's a work with echoes of Debussy, Ravel, and Satie, which he cautioned would be difficult to read at sight and would require much practice. Caprice arabe, along with the symphonic poem Africa and the "Egyptian" Piano Concerto, is one of a trio of piano compositions inspired by Saint-Saens' journeys to North Africa. The recital ends with another caprice, the virtuosic Caprice heroique, which leans more towards being capricious than heroic, despite it's powerful opening and fugue-like ending.

Frensh Music For Flute And Har

Poème

Complete Works For Piano And W

Camille Saint-Sa�ns was a man of exceptionally wide-ranging talents, a truly universal genius. Yet as a poet, dramatist, philosopher, astronomer, biologist, archaelogist, ethnologist, artist and caricaturist, and even as a pianist, he is completely forgotten; indeed even as a composer he went through a period of neglect. Yet the piano was his constant companion in a matchless career lasting more than three-quarters of a century, from his beginnings as a child prodigy to the last day of his life.

Pious restraint comes face to face with sensuous hedonism in Camille Saint-Saens’s grand-opera retelling of the Bible story of Samson and Delilah. Multi-Olivier Award winning director Richard Jones returns to The Royal Opera to stage this spectacular fin-de-siecle masterpiece, not performed at Covent Garden since 2004. Elina Garanca stars as the Philistine Dalila, SeokJong Baek as the inspiring Jewish hero Samson and Antonio Pappano conducts the full forces of the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House. With superb singing in solos and duets of great intimacy and fervour, gorgeous music with thrilling orchestral interludes, and splendid choral numbers for the Royal Opera Chorus – this is a performance to remember.

Francescatti who was a year younger than Heifetz, was among the foremost violinists of the mid-20th century, from about 1935 to 1975. In the words of critic Henry Roth, there was "a special character, a vitality and a savoir faire to his playing that set him apart from a host of gifted virtuosi who possessed vibrant sound and creditable musicianship." The concert performances collected here, all of them previously unissued, provide good examples of his Italianate lyricism and ravishing tone.

Saint-Saëns: Cello Concertos No. 1 & 2, Cello Sonata No. 1,

Classical Music

SAINT-SAËNS Violin Concertos: Nos 1–3 • Fanny Clamagirand (vn); Patrick Gallois, cond; Sinfonia Finlandia Jyväskylä • NAXOS 8.572037 (72:30)


Although Camille Saint-Saëns wrote three concertos for violin, the Third, along with his earlier Introduction and Rondo capriccioso and later Havanaise, have become the trio beloved of violinists and audiences alike. Only a few violinists, including Jacques Thibaud, Ruggiero Ricci, and Kyung-Wha Chung, adopted the First Concerto (actually the Second) in A Major, while the Second Concerto, outside a VoxBox 2-CDX 5084 performance by Ricci, remained for a long time in virtual limbo. Later recordings by Jean-Jacques Kantarow (the First Concerto on BIS 0860, Fanfare 21:6; the Second on BIS 1060, Fanfare 25:5; and the Third on BIS 1470, Fanfare 30:6) included all three works, but not on one disc. Naxos, which previously offered an idiomatic performance of the Third Concerto by Dong-Suk Kang (Naxos 8.550752, Fanfare 18:2), has now released all three together. Fanny Clamagirand, the young violinist assigned to the project, plays the Third Concerto with Grumiaux’s insinuating sweetness (he recorded the work twice with the Lamoureux Orchestra, first with Jean Fournet in June 1954 and second with Manuel Rosenthal in December 1963, the latter reissued on Philips Eloquence 8561, Fanfare 31:4) rather than Francescatti’s edgily Gallic wit or Milstein’s magisterial nobility. (The program proceeds in reverse order of familiarity, from the popular Third through the neglected First to the abandoned Second.) That comparison endures through the first movement, which Clamagirand plays boldly but mellifluously, through the second, into which she introduces a gently rocking, wistful melancholy equal to Grumiaux’s (concluding with a redolent rendition of the duet for violin in harmonics and clarinet), and the finale (in which she seems at once more playful and more relaxed than did Grumiaux). In general, she draws a warm tone, particularly throaty in the lower registers, from the 1700 Matteo Gofriller violin upon which she plays, even if the instrument doesn’t always seem sufficiently capacious tonally for the finale’s opening dramatic declamation. Patrick Gallois and the Sinfonia Finlandia Jyväskylä accompany her as atmospherically as Fournet and the Lamoureux Orchestra did Grumiaux.


While Ricci took the opening chords of the First Concerto as an invitation to slash and burn, Clamagirand breaks them in a more leisurely, if not quite indolent, manner. (That’s the beginning and the end of her idiosyncratic ideas in this concerto.) As did Thibaud (in a live performance on both Malibran-Music 150 and APR 5644, Fanfare 28:1), she realizes much of the opulent sensuousness of the subsidiary theme, but even though Thibaud’s game may have been a bit off live in 1953, Clamagirand’s surely isn’t, so the seductiveness doesn’t seem so much like a decadent, guilty pleasure. Again and again, one of her subtle gestures (no flamboyant swooping here) seems to speak volumes, and the purity of her tone in the upper registers enhances the impact of a phrase.


In the opening of the Second Concerto, in which the violin sweeps along virtuosically before striking a more expressive vein, Clamagirand makes a stronger impact than did Ricci, whose equally virtuosic though less opulent manner created from these passages more a dry, leaf-scattering autumn wind rather than a humid summer gust. Still, many may feel that even Clamagirand’s sympathetic approach (which rises to the heroic in the first movement and luxuriates lyrically in the second) can’t breathe life into the less strongly characterized thematic material, particularly perhaps in the finale.


Philippe Graffin recorded all three concertos (Hyperion CDA7074, reviewed by David K. Nelson and Ian Lace in Fanfare 23:3) and Liviu Prunaru followed with Lawrence Foster on Claves CD-50-2210, Fanfare 26:5. In discussing Jean-Jacques Kantorow’s performances of several of Saint-Saëns’s works for violin and orchestra in Fanfare 25:5, I suggested that Ricci had provided more voltage, and Graffin more atmosphere. In reviewing Prunaru’s set, I ranked his readings of all three concertos among the best, blending “Ricci’s almost reckless technical panache with Graffin’s fastidious attention to expressive detail.” But Clamagirand makes as strong and idiomatic an impression (except perhaps for what might seem to be her ungainly entrance in the First Concerto), and violinistically, even a stronger one at climactic moments.


Strongly recommended for its soaring performances, in lively recorded sound. Fanny Clamagirand seems to have all the prerequisites for a strong violinistic personality—at least as strong as Grumiaux’s or Stern’s. Time after time, I listen to performances that seem convincing until I check my impressions by listening to one of the violinists of the golden age, at which time the star of the new performer suddenly seems to shine less brilliantly. I can’t believe that that will happen for most listeners with Fanny Clamagirand. Urgently recommended for that reason alone.


FANFARE: Robert Maxham


This recording has a lot of competition. Even Naxos have two other versions of the Third Concerto available: Grumiaux in their Classical Archives series (9.80608), and the 1994 Dong-Suk Kang recording (8.550752), which might well have been the first version owned by many listeners. Does it make sense to market another CD of these works, particularly of the Third? In the current financial climate, almost certainly not - neither Fanny Clamagirand nor the Sinfonia Finlandia Jyväskylä, nor indeed Patrick Gallois, can really be considered names sufficiently 'big' to trigger loyalty buying.

Fortunately for music-lovers, Naxos often appear not to let profitability be their chief concern. Curious as it may seem, this appears to be their first recording of the First and Second Concertos. More to the point, this is a CD crammed with beautiful music.

Clamagirand has a fine, warm tone, ideal for this kind of music. This is her first major recording for Naxos - previously appearing only as soloist in Georges Taconet's Violin Sonata on Marco Polo in 2005. On this form, it is a safe bet that it will not be her last. Few outside Finland will likely be very familiar with the Sinfonia Finlandia Jyväskylä; their name will not roll off the tongues of many non-Finns! Yet the group has been making music for half a century or so and their Naxos CDs of Haydn, Kraus, Witt, Gounod and Gershwin, have been reviewed here. Their experience shows in these recordings: they deliver practically faultless performances, deftly guided by the reliable Patrick Gallois.

Saint-Saëns may not be the most profound of composers, but as an inventive melodist he is virtually unsurpassed. Many music-lovers will be familiar with the Third Violin Concerto in B minor, op.61, particularly the gorgeous slow(ish) movement; it still finds an occasional spot in the concert repertoire. Yet the other two concertos also deserve a place, written as they are with listener enjoyment in mind, rather than intellectual dissection. The First (published) Concerto in A, op.20is better described as concise rather than short. Bright and instantly memorable, it would make a superb encore piece for the intrepid concert soloist. The Second (published) Concerto in C, op.58 is, despite the opus number, a relatively early work, written a year before the First. It is both stylish and dramatic, particularly in the first movement - which is actually longer than the First Concerto - and the unusual, almost Sicilian-sounding second.

The recording is very good, with an excellent balance between orchestra and soloist. For good measure and no obvious reason, there is a postcard-style photo of the Seine at dusk on the CD cover.

As far as this disc is concerned, no one should let the Naxos price differential be the only consideration: this is quality music in quality performances.

-- Byzantion, MusicWeb International

Saint-Saëns holds a vital place in the history of French chamber music. At a time when his compatriots were more devoted to opera and song, Saint-Saëns (who wrote both, too) repeatedly produced chamber music of compelling individuality and lasting significance. The 1875 Piano Quartet in B flat major, Op 41 remains one of the great works in the chamber repertory, a masterful example of the composer’s organisational skill and lyric gifts. The gorgeous Barcarolle is followed by the youthful Piano Quintet in A minor, Op 14, a brilliantly confident work with a concerto-like role for the piano.

‘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. This new Déjanire received high praise from the critics, who flocked to Monaco to see it. But the modernist path that French opera was taking at the time did not allow the work to survive the upheavals of the First World War. It would have been a shame to prolong this unjustified ostracism any longer.

The French violinist Hugues Borsarello draws this programme of miniatures from the repertory of his instrument and from the great operatic arias, transcribed for violin and orchestra: ‘My idea was to relate a French history of music over the course of three centuries, in the form of short pieces.’ Lully’s Marche pour la cérémonie des Turcs rubs shoulders with arias by Bizet, Saint-Saëns and Offenbach, Satie’s Gymnopédie no.3 and Gounod’s Ave Maria. All these universally known pieces ‘are perfectly suited to the soul of the violin’, says Borsarello, who is joined by prestigious guests: cellist Gautier Capuçon for Vieuxtemps’s Duo Brillant, guitarist Thomas Dutronc for Django Reinhardt’s celebrated Nuages, pianist Frank Braley.

And this programme doesn’t neglect the classics of the violin, including Ysaÿe’s magnificent Berceuse de l'enfant pauvre. Vieuxtemps’s famous set of variations on Yankee Doodle is here performed for the first time in its version with orchestra.

Interesting works for violin and orchestra, inspired by vocal compositions. Lalo: Violin Concerto No. 1 & No. 4, Rimsky-Korsakov: Songs, arranged for violin & chamber orchestra, etc.