Piano Concerto no.2 in G minor op.22
Andante sostenuto – Allegro scherzando – Presto

“the further sensitivity evolves, the more distant music and the other arts become from the status of purity. If one demands feelings and nothing more, art ceases to exist.”
Saint-Saens

Camille Saint-Saens was a man of many interests. He variously acquired a reputation as a philosopher, poet, and playwright, as an astronomer, scientist, archaeologist, and ethnologist, even as a graphic designer and cartoonist. His main passion, however, was music.

Saint-Saens began to learn the piano from the age of two and a half at the insistence of his mother, who, putting present day “tiger mothers” to shame, had already decided that her first son should be a musician, her second a painter, and her third a sculptor.

The boy was found to possess perfect pitch at the age of two, but delayed his first composition, a short piece for the piano, until the age of three and a half. He could read and write by the age of three, had learnt some Latin by the age of seven and made his first concert appearance at the age of five. At ten years of age, Saint-Saens gave his debut recital at the Salle Pleyel and, as an encore, he offered to play any of Beethoven’s 32 sonatas from memory. At thirteen, Saint-Saens was admitted to the Paris Conservatoire.

He was appointed organist at the Eglise de las Madeleine in Paris, where he stunned everybody with his improvisations.
In 1861 Saint-Saens accepted his only post as teacher, at the Ecole de Musique Classique et Religieuse, Paris. There he scandalised some more austere colleagues by introducing his students to 
contemporary music, including that of Schumann, Liszt and Wagner. Perhaps his best known pupil was Gabriel Faure, though many others were influenced by him, including Ravel, who claimed that his own G major concerto was written - in the spirit of Mozart and Saint-Saens.

In 1888, two years after the composition of “The Carnival of the Animals”, his mother died and Saint-Saens, in mourning, commenced a world tour, taking in such exotic destinations as Southeast Asia and South America. The local music influenced some of his later compositions, and Saint-Saens chronicled his travels in many books under his nom de plume, Sannois.

In 1908, Saint-Saens was the first celebrated composer to write the music score for a motion picture.

The composer died in his chosen home in Algiers in October 1921 and was awarded the Legion d’Honneur. He was the first major French composer to write piano concertos.

The present Second Concerto was composed in the spring of 1868 for the impending conducting debut of the Russian composer Anton Rubinstein in Paris, and was written in little more than two weeks. The premiere was given on 13th May 1868 with Saint-Saens himself at the piano. Nevertheless, despite lack of rehearsal time, it has become one of the composer’s best loved works and is, and was, part of the concert repertoire of many distinguished pianists, including Liszt. In June 1913, the composer played the Scherzo movement in Queen’s Hall, London, during a concert celebrating his seventy-fifth anniversary as a concert pianist.

The composer experimented with form in this piece, replacing the customary sonata first movement with a more discursive structure, opening with a Bach-like improvisatory cadenza. The scherzo second movement and the presto finale are in such contrast with the opening that it has been remarked that the work “begins like Bach and ends like Offenbach”.

Whereas the first movement, in G minor, is conceived in the spirit of a large-scale piano improvisation in which the orchestra tends to play a subordinate role, the second movement, in E flat major, is a playful romp, with dialogue batted back and forward between piano and orchestra, and the last movement, which returns to G minor, is just a hell for leather race to the final chords. Whenever the pianist flags, he, or she, is goaded on by the orchestra.
I chose this piece because it always makes me happy, whenever I hear it played. I am not so sure that the mood has continued, whilst trying to master it myself!

Nevertheless, I hope you enjoy hearing it performed today.