Hyperion Concludes Saint-Saëns Project

courtesy of PIAS

As I observed yesterday morning, my process of catching up on accumulated content has now shifted from physical recordings to downloads. One of the more critical aspects of that work involves catching up on ongoing series of releases. One of these was the project of the Utah Symphony led by Music Director Thierry Fischer to record all of the symphonies of Camille Saint-Saëns. The producer for this project was Hyperion Records, and the first release appeared almost exactly a year ago. That recording accounted for the most familiar of the symphonies, Opus 78 (the third) in C minor, best known as the “Organ” symphony, which was presented along with shorter selections of music for dramatic settings.

The second album was released at the beginning of this past May, coupling Opus 55 (the second) in A minor with an early symphony in F major that never received an opus number but carried the subtitle “Urbs Roma” (the city of Rome). The cycle then concluded at the end of this past November with a third album completing the full complement of five symphonies. It begins with the Opus 2 (first) symphony, completed in 1853, and concludes with another early symphony in A major without an opus number, probably composed in 1850. These two symphonies account for about an hour’s worth of music, which is a bit skimpy for a compact disc; so they are separated by one of Saint-Saëns’ most familiar compositions, The Carnival of the Animals.

My guess is that most readers are unfamiliar with the symphonies on this album. For that matter, I suspect that most concert-goers do not know how many symphonies Saint-Saëns composed. If asked, they might remember that the “Organ” is the third and assume (correctly) that it is the last symphony he wrote. However, they probably would not know about any of the earlier symphonies (including with unnumbered ones).

I am of two minds where this matter of Saint-Saëns’ legacy is concerned. One is to side with the crowd and declare that none of the other four symphonies are particularly memorable. On the other hand I am willing to confess that I felt the same way about the piano concertos (five of them, all with opus numbers). The fact is that I only began to appreciate those concertos after having experienced them in performance, rather than on recording; and I look forward to encountering a conductor here in San Francisco willing to acknowledge that Saint-Saëns composed symphonies other than Opus 78!

One interesting aspect of the two symphonies of this third album is that, in both of them, the slow movement is the longest. This leads me to wonder if one of the composer’s “sweet spots” was the rhetoric of meditative reflection. These movements unfold over the course of their extended breadth without feeling as if they were going on for too long. Perhaps this is the “hook” required for beginning to accept those four symphonies prior to Opus 78 on their own terms.