Saint-Saëns: Piano Concerto No. 1; Piano Concerto No. 2; Piano Concerto No. 3; Piano Concerto No. 4; Piano Concerto No. 5; Wedding Cake; Rapsodie d'Auvergne

COMPOSERS: Saint-Sa‘ns
LABELS: Hyperion
WORKS: Piano Concerto No. 1; Piano Concerto No. 2; Piano Concerto No. 3; Piano Concerto No. 4; Piano Concerto No. 5; Wedding Cake; Rapsodie d’Auvergne
PERFORMER: Stephen Hough (piano); CBSO/Sakari Oramo
CATALOGUE NO: CDA 67331-32

Saint-Saëns’s five piano concertos span some 40 years, yet this was little more than half his working life. The composer is often portrayed as the grand old reactionary of French music, a man born soon after the premiere of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, who died three years after Debussy in 1921 and who refused to enter the 20th century, let alone the late 19th. The concertos take up where Liszt left off, though bombast is leavened by Saint-Saëns’s ebullience, in evidence most obviously in the most popular of the five, and the only one to have a regular place in the repertoire, the Second. Stephen Hough is well known for his advocacy of difficult causes (Mompou is a particularly unnecessary example) and few non-French pianists have managed to make the whole range of Saint-Saëns’s works their own. Where Hough succeeds is in both the depth of expression he brings to the music’s Romanticism and the energy with which he effortlessly traverses the passages where there seem to be more notes than music. The addition of the shorter concertante works provides the icing on the Wedding Cake. The accompaniments from the CBSO under Sakari Oramo are handsomely played and the recordings, although spread over a year and different venues, like the performances, have a sense of unity. Matthew Rye