Among the many works that influenced him on this area have been naturally the pairs of piano concertos by Chopin, Liszt and Mendelssohn. As a boy of ten or so, Saint-Saëns had been forbidden by his instructor Camille Stamaty from presenting himself to Chopin, whether or not out of jealousy or as a result of Stamaty really felt Chopin’s affect could be harmful.

However in any case, the paucity of the orchestra’s function within the Chopin concertos may by no means have glad Saint-Saëns; on the similar time, a steadiness between the 2 forces needed to be maintained, and he had no time for works wherein the devices of the orchestra ‘run in all instructions like poisoned rats’.

As for Liszt, Saint-Saëns later recalled assembly him as a 17 year-old: ‘I already thought of him to be a genius. Think about my astonishment then, when I discovered that he far exceeded even this expectation.’ However once more, the flashier moments in Liszt’s concertos bore with them the potential for endangering the shape. Mendelssohn’s affect seems principally within the extra light-hearted moments. Regardless of the influences from these three predecessors, one factor is definite – these 5 concertos are all fully totally different from one another.

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Saint-Saëns’s First Concerto

The primary one dates from 1858, the identical yr as a quite totally different piano concerto, Brahms’s First. Saint-Saëns later recalled that it had been impressed by the Forest of Fontainebleau the place he and his buddies used to picnic, which explains the open-air horn calls that start the work – very unusually for a concerto.

This starting is then leavened by teams of paired notes (the ballerina enters en pointe) in order that the motion can partly draw its vitality from the distinction. The repeats of the horn calls at essential moments within the construction are all of the simpler as a result of the horns don’t have anything else of be aware to contribute.

The sluggish motion, wherein the orchestra is diminished to solo clarinet and bassoon with strings, begins solemnly, however is then invaded by piano cadenzas principally with out barlines whose figuration, author Philip Borg-Wheeler suggests, ‘anticipate Ravel by an excellent 50 years’.

The finale presents an excellent humoured, energetic dialog between piano and full orchestra, the humour extending to the piano’s spoof starting to a hymn which instantly turns into one thing much more secular. That is the Saint-Saëns who, a couple of years later, would dance a bit of ballet quantity in non-public with Tchaikovsky, the Frenchman as Galatea to the Russian’s Pygmalion. The horn calls return to announce the ultimate peroration – nothing as severe as a cyclic look on the strains of Liszt, extra a perky ‘Bear in mind us?’.

Saint-Saëns’s Second Concerto

The Second Concerto, for a while within the composer’s head then written down over a mere 17 days in 1868, has for years been the preferred, and it’s not exhausting to see why. The lengthy, freely dramatic piano solo that opens it originated from one of many composer’s organ improvisations within the type of Bach, and gives a cushty, acquainted entrance to the work.

The piano theme that follows was borrowed from a choral ‘Tantum ergo’ by the composer’s pupil Fauré with the unflattering rationalization, ‘Give it to me and I’ll make one thing of it!’ (Their friendship nonetheless lasted some 60 years till Saint-Saëns’s dying in 1921.) The second theme, marked dolce cantabile, is likewise acquainted, this time referring again to the type of Chopin’s Nocturnes, then developed via ‘perlé’ figuration to extra majestic utterance.

The scherzo, the rating of which is peppered with the instruction leggieramente, could or could not have been impressed by that in Litolff’s Fourth Concerto Symphonique of 1852, however in any case it’s a locus classicus for the usage of le jeu perlé.

It wants saying that that is very a lot imperilled by the widespread behavior of enjoying the second tune extra slowly and with heavy, galumphing accents: discover must be taken of the exemplary 1957 recording by Jeanne-Marie Darré, whose performances of the concertos as a young person have been permitted by the composer and who permits herself no such licence.

The finale, the climax of the accelerando working over the three actions, is a wild tarantella, whose demonic progress is barely halted by a chronic dose of piano trills. Has the composer misplaced the plot right here? A remaining tease comes within the concluding bars the place orchestral crashes arrive on the unsuitable beats. However worry not… All is below management.

Liszt was heat in his reward of the Second Concerto, noting that it confirmed ‘the pianistic results to good benefit with out sacrificing any compositional rules, a fundamental rule on this style.’

Saint-Saëns’s Third Concerto

It appears doubtless that this response instantly inspired Saint-Saëns to strive his hand on the medium once more, however as regular there may very well be no query of rewriting successful: the Third Concerto of 1869 lacks the crowd-pleasing attributes of its predecessor, although in 1906 Fauré wrote that it ‘particularly deserves to emerge from the shadows the place it has been left to slumber’.

At first, the opening E flat piano arpeggios (borrowed from Wagner’s Das Rheingold?) appear to be going nowhere. Then there are two cadenzas within the first motion, the place such issues aren’t usually discovered. The primary efficiency, given by the composer on the Leipzig Gewandhaus in 1869, was greeted with hostility, pushed additionally by a technically creative begin to the sluggish motion – one other of his teases, however one unwell tailored to a German viewers, for a lot of of whom concertos have been issues of great import, in order that afterwards events professional and con resorted to punch-ups within the corridors.

The finale is much less problematic, with its upward leaps adopted by small downward steps probably echoing the finale of Beethoven’s ‘Emperor’ Concerto in the identical key. Even so, one French critic of the primary efficiency claimed that the work foretold the dying of the concerto as a style, a place that will, as Borg-Wheeler suggests, have stemmed from the significance of the orchestral contribution, in accordance with Liszt’s ‘compositional rules’.

Saint-Saëns’s Fourth Concerto

Together with his Fourth Concerto in C minor of 1875, Saint-Saëns appears to have been set on repairing the injury inflicted by its predecessor. It begins not with the outside horn calls of No. 1, nor with the piano solos of Nos 2 and three, however with a theme of two common eight-bar segments, every exactly echoed by the pianist. No listeners, even in Germany, may complain about this Classical construction: instantly we all know the place we’re.

As to the theme’s emotive character, was the opening of Mozart’s C minor Concerto K491 maybe lurking within the background? Saint-Saëns performed a Mozart concerto in his first public live performance, in Paris in 1846, and did so once more in Gloucester on the Three Choirs Competition 67 years later. When the piano then breaks into virtuosic figuration, that is nonetheless based mostly on the theme, thus combining the ornamental with the substantial, with the end result that for the primary three minutes or so of the motion we hear nothing however the theme.

Additionally Classical is the association of the 5 sections of the work into fast-slow-fast-slow-fast. Towards this sample is ready the Romantic, Lisztian one among repetition throughout the actions: the woodwind chorale of the second part reappears within the final one as the principle theme, once more of eight bars, although now as an alternative of the orchestra being echoed by the piano, the sample is reversed.

Altogether, as musicologist Michael Stegemann claims, the concerto represents a ‘good union of Traditional mind with the structural freedom of Romanticism’. Comparability of the recordings by Darré and Alfred Cortot, demonstrating Classical and Romantic approaches respectively, proves that the work can flourish in each environments.

Between that concerto of 1875 and the Fifth of 1896, a lot had modified within the French musical world, most notably the arrival of Wagnermania. Saint-Saëns, whereas accepting that Wagner was a genius, refused to treat the German as all-conquering, and the Fifth Concerto suggests different influences have been equally legitimate. It needs to be stated that, for him, Debussy was not one among these, the 2 composers waging a subterranean duel that ended solely with Debussy’s dying in 1918.

Saint-Saëns’s Fifth Concerto

Even so, Saint-Saëns was joyful to incorporate within the Fifth’s final two actions at the very least a few ‘Impressionist’ parts. The primary motion exhibits his peerless potential to bend Classical parts to his personal ends: in construction it retains some traces of sonata type, however its ten sections depart the impression quite of a fantasia, large chordal passages being contrasted with these of jeu perlé.

He had made sketches for this motion in 1894, however the final two actions date fully from his keep in Egypt within the winter of ’95 and spring of ’96. The central motion’s Impressionist aspect is the croaking of frogs, whereas a particularly Egyptian one is a Nubian love track he heard sung by boatmen on the Nile. Impressionism assumes a extra aggressive tone within the finale, with what the composer described because the thumps of a ship’s propeller.

The composer premiered this concerto on 2 June 1896 in a live performance celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of his first public look as a pianist.

Why did Saint-Saëns solely compose 5 piano concertos?

He lived for one more 25 years, however seemingly with none ideas of a sixth concerto. Perhaps he merely felt he had stated all he needed to say within the style, or maybe he thought it dangerous type to outdo Beethoven.

It’s also doable that he was the sufferer of French musical politics. The 1896 live performance kind of coincided with the inspiration in Paris of the Schola Cantorum, a conservatory directed by Vincent d’Indy to advertise the values of César Franck, amongst which faith figured largely.

The concerto as a style, with its embrace of virtuosity as a most important ingredient, was more and more thought to be vulgar, superficial and self-promoting – by 1904, because the pianist Marguerite Lengthy later remembered, concerto performances in Paris have been usually being disrupted by shouts and whistles.

It’s due to this fact fairly conceivable that Saint-Saëns, getting ready to his eighth decade, most well-liked to not put his head in that exact noose. Definitely, if the 5 concertos we possess provoke any shouts today, they’re subsequent ones of ‘bravo’.