Saint-Saëns
Le Carnaval des animaux; Poèmes symphoniques etc
Les Siècles/François-Xavier Roth
Harmonia Mundi HMM 902614.15 110:58 mins (2-discs)
I can’t be sure how many versions of the symphonic poem La Jeunesse d’Hercule I’ve heard over the last 60 years or so, but it’s been lodged in my brain for a long time as one of the composer’s less-inspired efforts, and overlong to wit. But now, at last, I’ve seen the light thanks to François-Xavier Roth’s interpretation. One of his many virtues is that he’s not afraid of making his orchestra play very, very quietly; another is that, where a composer has not noted dynamics, Roth feels free to invent them, and does so with finesse. This gives life not only to individual phrases, but to long paragraphs, so we can follow the composer’s rhetoric. At 18’29”, this poem now seems just as long as is necessary. In Le Rouet d’Omphale the strings are wonderfully elegant and, were such a thing still needed these days, fully justify the use of period instruments. At the other extreme, the dynamic climaxes, in the so-called ‘Bacchanale’ from Samson et Dalila and elsewhere, take the breath away – as they should. Le Carnaval des animaux similarly sparkles with life: I particularly enjoyed the movement called ‘Pianistes’, where the two pianists, playing a 1928 Érard double piano with keyboards facing each other, obey the composer’s instruction ‘to imitate the playing of a beginner and their clumsiness’ to hilarious effect. The recording ends with Saint-Saëns’s music for the 1908 film L’Assassinat du duc de Guise, the first-ever commissioned film score. Roth admits it’s not Saint-Saëns’s greatest piece (the composer didn’t bother to attend the public showing), but, in the hands of Les Siècles, it has some value as a curiosity. Roger Nichols