Hyperion Continues Saint-Saëns Recording Project

courtesy of PIAS

Yesterday Hyperion Records released the second album in its cycle of recordings to account for the music of Camille Saint-Saëns.The focus of the project is on that composer’s five symphonies. The first album focused attention on the best known of those symphonies, Opus 78 (the third) in C minor, best known as the “Organ” symphony. The new album presents Opus 55 (the second) in A minor and an early symphony in F major that never received an opus number but carried the subtitle “Urbs Roma” (the city of Rome). Performances are by the Utah Symphony led by Music Director Thierry Fischer. One more volume will be released later this year to account for the remaining two symphonies.

Saint-Saëns lived to the ripe old age of 86. However, if he lived a good life; he spent his final decades viewed as a reactionary. Ironically, in 1910 he was the only French musician who took the trouble to travel to Munich at attend the premiere of Gustav Mahler’s eighth symphony; but that was probably the most “advanced” composition he took the trouble to experience. The vast extent of Mahler’s resources may have been on his mind when he was invited to attend The Panama-Pacific International Exposition here in San Francisco in 1915. For that occasion he brought with him “Hail, California,” whose performance required about 150 players in the Exposition Orchestra. Extravagance aside, he had a keen ear for instrumentation, which may be the primary reason why Maurice Ravel admired him. The mind behind that ear is already evident in the “Urbs Roma” symphony, composed in 1856, a time when “modernism” was still being associated with the likes of Richard Wagner.

As a conductor Fischer does a first-rate job of making sure that those who listen to this recording will appreciate Saint-Saëns’ command of a large instrumental ensemble. Nevertheless, his expressive rhetoric through sonorities does not always compensate for the relatively shallow structures of his symphonic movements. As a result, listeners are likely to find more satisfaction in the track that separates the two symphonies, which serves up a dynamite account of the Opus 40 “Danse macabre” featuring violin solo work by Madeline Adkins. (It is almost impossible to believe that the thematic content originated in an 1872 art song; but, as that tedious trope from Amadeus goes, “There it is!”)

As was the case with the first album, all recordings were made during concert performances in Abravanel Hall; and Fischer brings a fresh sense of rhetoric to all three compositions on the album, which suggests that he has found virtues in those symphonies that have, to date, eluded me.