Utah Takes on Saint-Saëns’ “Organ” Symphony

from an Amazon.com Web page

The New Year will begin with the launch of a cycle of recordings produced by Hyperion Records to account for the music of Camille Saint-Saëns. The primary objective will be to account for all of that composer’s five symphonies. Performances will be by the Utah Symphony led by Music Director Thierry Fischer, making this the first commercial recording of all five symphonies by an American orchestra.

The first release will be available this coming Friday. It includes only one of the symphonies, but that one is the best known of the five, Opus 78 (the third) in C minor, best known as the “Organ” symphony. The organist is Paul Jacobs, and the recording was made during concert performances in Abravanel Hall. The entire recording is based on the full program for those performances, which includes the instrumental “Bacchanale” from the final act of Saint-Saëns’ Opus 47 opera Samson and Delilah and three Opus 130 “symphonic tableaux” provided as incidental music for the play La foi (faith) by Eugène Brieux. As usual, Amazon.com has set up a Web page to process pre-orders for this new recording.

The last time I wrote about Opus 78 was over a year ago after Warner Classics released a recording of the Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia led by its current Music Director, Antonio Pappano. At that time I made the bold observation that “this is music that really does not deserve to be recorded, particularly for listeners who now experience music only through their ear buds.” I felt I could take that extreme position as one who had experienced performances of the symphony in two major concert halls, one on either side of the country. I still hold to my opinion.

Nevertheless, I shall elaborate a bit by taking the risk of venturing into territory previously established by Woody Allen. In Annie Hall he tells a two-line joke about an exchange between two old women at a resort in the Catskills:

First woman: The food here is terrible.

Second woman: Yes, and the portions are so small!

While many may find this a matter of picking nits, when I listen to a recording of a pipe organ, I am as interested in the pipes as I am in the organist and the composers whose music is being played. When it comes to information about the organ that Jacobs is playing, the Hyperion booklet provides (in the language of those old women) bupkis. So perhaps I should not quibble over missing out on a physical experience when I have no way of knowing what was actually providing that physical experience!

The two selections that precede Opus 78 are both reflections on the pre-Christian Middle East. The “Bacchanale” takes place in the temple of Dagon, celebrating how Delilah robbed Samson of his strength by cutting his hair. (The celebrants are unaware that Samson is about to bring down the house, so to speak.) Fischer provides a perfectly capable reading with the appropriate stirring conclusion; but, for those of my generation that grew up on such things as Saturday morning cartoons, it is hard to listen to this music without thinking of the music that Carl W. Stalling wrote for the Looney Tunes cartoon series or the ways in which composers from Spike Jones to Peter Schickele could add their own twists to Stalling’s techniques.

Listening to the Opus 130 selections is a far less irreverent experience, but it reflects a seriousness that is no longer of our own time. Indeed, I often whether or not such a claim can be made of much, if not all, of the Saint-Saëns canon. I suppose I shall have to wait for the remaining two volumes before coming to any conclusions about exceptions to that claim.