Cala Records have some enterprising repertoire among
their burgeoning number of labels, 20 of them conducted by their founder,
the conductor Geoffrey Simon. This one mixes the ever-popular third
symphony with the less familiar Requiem and one of his many overtures,
La princesse jaune, an early (1872) one-act operetta based on
an oriental fantasy. Saint-Saëns was heavily into the middle and
far east, the French North African colonies (the fantasy Africa,
the Suite algérienne and so on) as well as the more obvious
Samson and Delilah as a subject for his best known opera. Far
from being a story about jaundiced royalty, this relates the experience
of a Dutchman transported Berlioz-like under the influence of narcotics
to Japan where he falls for a figurine of a yellow princess, only to
awake to find himself in the arms of his beloved. The overture is a
charming piece of music owing much to Offenbach in many ways.
The Requiem was written pre-mortem at the request of
a friend, Albert Libon, and when the event occurred in 1877, the composer
duly wrote his commission in eight days. Its operatic style recalls
Verdi, quotes the familiar Dies Irae, and supplicates entreatingly between
the quartet of soloists and chorus with music of considerable beauty,
particularly the Hostias. Harps, organ and four trombones are among
its most distinctive moments of translucent orchestration, and it’s
hard to know why the work is not performed more often, for at 35 minutes
it would make a good half of a concert with, say Fauré’s in the
other. A tragic footnote to the history of this Requiem occurred when,
shortly after the composer returned from Switzerland, where he wrote
it, his young son fell to his death from the fourth floor of the Saint-Saëns
family home in Paris, followed just a few weeks later by the death from
illness of his other child. Just as with Mahler and Dvorak, such music
often finds resonances in composers’ family lives, whether written as
a premonition or in response to such awful events.
When Saint-Saëns wrote his third (in fact fifth
but two are unnumbered) symphony he was at the height of his popularity
as a composer, pianist, and conductor at the age of fifty. It was the
Philharmonic Society in London which commissioned the work, first performed
there on 19 May 1886 and dedicated to Liszt who was to die at Bayreuth
in July that year. It is essentially a work in two halves, each an Allegro
preceded by a slow introduction. The organ’s appearance in the finale
is one of the most thrilling in music and surely accounts for its popularity
ever since its triumphant premiere. It certainly was, and remains ‘a
treat for the people who hear it’.
The performers on this excellent disc all serve the
music well, the acoustics sufficiently spacious for this ethereal music,
and the excellent quartet of soloists (whatever happened to Tinuke Olafimihan
after her thrilling singing in Porgy and Bess?) blend magnificently.
It must have been odd to record it all without an organ, which was apparently
dubbed in a few months later, but thanks to science and the glorious
playing of James O’Donnell, it proved a seamless operation to insert
it. The orchestral playing by the LPO is unsurprisingly superb. The
disc is a digital remastering
Christopher Fifield
Tinuke Olafimihan
(soprano)