symphony concert04

Some people seem to find everything easy, be it learning a new language, writing, scientific research or composing. Camille Saint-Saëns was one such universal genius who was already composing at the age of three-and-a-half and remained productive without interruption until his eighty-sixth year, with the same ease as a tree bears fruit. In a portrait concert commemorating the 95th anniversary of Saint-Saëns’s death, Gürzenich Orchestra Principal Conductor François-Xavier Roth has chosen three of the most important works from the French composer’s output. In Danse macabre from 1874, an out-of-tune violin accompanies rattling skeletons in a demonic nighttime dance, a masterpiece of program music with almost impressionistic timbres. His Fifth Piano Concerto, completed in 1896 in North Africa, where Saint-Saëns had found a second home, is quite different. The concerto was given the nickname “Egyptian” because of the Oriental character of the middle movement in which – as Saint-Saëns said – a Nubian love song he once “heard boatmen on the Nile singing” can be heard. Finally, in the “Organ Symphony” of 1885-86 the wealth of tonal color produced by the large orchestra, against which the “queen of instruments” has to measure itself, is impressive. Daniel Roth, the father of the Gürzenich principal conductor and titular organist of the Church of Saint-Sulpice, Paris – and one of the best organists of our time – will make it a work of astonishing grandeur.