[6/10/2012] Don't worry about the unusual form of Saint-Saëns's Piano Concerto No. 4 -- just go with it! (continued)

Meng-Chieh Liu plays part 1 of the Saint-Saëns Piano Concerto No. 4 with Gustavo Dudamel conducting Venezuela's Simón Bolívar Youth Symphony Orchestra. (The performance concludes here.)


WIKIPEDIA ON SAINT-SAËNS'S FOURTH PIANO CONCERTO

The main melody of Saint-Saëns's Fourth Piano Concerto.

Piano Concerto No. 4 in C minor, Op. 44, by Camille Saint-Saëns is the composer's most structurally innovative piano concerto. It follows the typical concerto format of three movements, but the central Andante section is unusually attached seamlessly to the preceding Allegro moderato. In fact, the entire work can be played as a unified whole. It is technically divided into two sections:

Allegro moderato - Andante
Allegro vivace - Andante - Allegro

It begins with a gently mischievous chromatic subject, heard in dialogue between the strings and piano soloist, and continues in a creative thematic development similar to Saint-Saëns's Third Symphony. The composer demonstrates brilliant skill in employing the piano and orchestra almost equally. In the Andante, he introduces a hymn-like theme with the woodwinds (also strikingly similar to the tune of the Third Symphony's final section), and uses this as a platform on which he builds a series of variations before bringing the movement to a quiet close.

The Allegro vivace begins as a playful and cunning scherzo (although still in C minor), deriving its main theme from the original chromatic subject in the beginning of the first movement. There is a bold switch to 6/8 time, and the piano leads the orchestra into a new brief but energetic theme, oddly resembling the popular song "The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo." Eventually the orchestra moves into a lush Andante, recapitulating the chorale-style melody. Rather suddenly, the piano climbs up to a flurry of double-octave trills and a climactic trumpet fanfare, leading to the jubilant finale based once more on the hymn theme played at triple time. The concerto concludes with the piano, in cadenza-like cascades, guiding the orchestra to a fortissimo close.

The piano concerto was premièred in 1875 with the composer as the soloist. The concerto is dedicated to Antoine Door, a professor of piano at the Vienna Conservatory. It continues to be one of Saint-Saëns's most popular piano concertos, second only to the Piano Concerto No. 2 in G minor. This highly inventive work, along with many others, does much to refute the caricature of a purely reactionary Saint-Saëns.

NOW LET'S LISTEN TO THE PIECE

It's intriguing how commentators confidently break the composer's two-movement form into three, or maybe four, movements. Might we consider the possibility that what he actually had in mind was, you know, two fairly unusually put-together movements? I would also suggest listening for elements that sound distinctly French (for example, generally when the soloist goes into dizzying overdrive), and elements that, you know don't, that sound, perhaps, Germanic -- or maybe specifically Viennese.


SAINT-SAËNS: Piano Concerto No. 4 in C minor, Op. 44:
i. Allegro moderato; Andante

The breathless-toned mysterious tone conductor Sakari Oramo brings to the opening of the concerto in the Hyperion recording recalls the performance styles of the 1944 and 1955 recordings we hear below, and Stephen Hough is certainly a capable partner in their attractive and widely admired Hyperion set, which includes the performances of Africa and Wedding Cake we heard in Friday night's preview and two more short Saint-Saëns works for piano and orchestra. I like the set too, but it seems to me to represent a limited, not-very-dramatic perspective on the music.

Compare the much broader range of musical values on display in Eugene Ormandy's performance (from which we heard a snatch of the second movement in the June 1 Sunday Classics preview). I also enjoy the gravitas André Previn hears in the music. Both Philippe Entremont and Jean-Philippe Collard acquit themselves honorably, but the performances don't seem to me their shows.


Stephen Hough, piano; City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Sakari Oramo, cond. Hyperion, recorded 2000

Philippe Entremont, piano; Philadelphia Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy, cond. Columbia/CBS/Sony, recorded Feb. 5, 1961

Jean-Philippe Collard, piano; Royal Philharmonic, André Previn, cond. EMI, recorded November 1985


ii. Allegro vivace; Andante; Allegro

Again I've arranged our three performances from quickest to slowest. I like both the Rogé-Dutoit and the Malikova-Sanderling but am most taken by the Ciccolini-Baudo. Maybe their EMI set of the five Saint-Saëns piano concertos has been so readily available (in the LP era it was long available in the U.S. as an extremely attractive budget-priced Seraphim set) that it's rather consistently underrated, it seems to me.


Pascal Rogé, piano; Philharmonia Orchestra, Charles Dutoit, cond. Decca, recorded July 1979

Anna Malikova, piano; WDR (West German Radio) Symphony Orchestra, Thomas Sanderling, cond. Audite, recorded c2005

Aldo Ciccolini, piano; Orchestre de Paris, Serge Baudo, cond. EMI, recorded Nov.-Dec. 1970


THREE HISTORICAL RECORDINGS, SPANNING TWO DECADES

Three French pianists, two French orchestras-and-conductors. (When Robert Casadesus rerecorded the concerto in stereo, it would again be with the New York Philharmonic, this time under Leonard Bernstein. Makes you wonder if he had some sort of rule like "I only record Saint-Saëns 4 with the New York Philharmonic.")

I'm afraid I've never gotten the special qualities so many music lovers hear in the playing of Alfred Cortot, and while I don't have a problem with anything he does in the 1935 recording, most of its interest for me is in the dynamic as well as spacious conducting of the pre-Boston Charles Munch. (Munch in fact rerecorded Saint-Saëns 4 during his Boston, with Alexander Brailowsky, though unfortunatelly only in mono -- a recording I've never heard.)

Note the lighter-textured but wonderfully mysterious tone that conductors Artur Rodzinski and Louis Fourestier set at the opening of the 1944 and 1955 recordings, and then the wonderful contrast of Casadesus's solidly commanding solo responses. Jeanne-Marie Darré, by contrast, plays in the same mystery-laden tone. This is our most "French" performance of the concerto, and a highly effective one.

SAINT-SAËNS: Piano Concerto No. 4 in C minor, Op. 44:
i. Allegro moderato; Andante
ii. Allegro vivace; Andante; Allegro


Alfred Cortot, piano; Paris Conservatory Orchestra, Charles Munch, cond. EMI, recorded July 9, 1935

Robert Casadesus, piano; Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra of New York, Artur Rodzinski, cond. American Columbia, recorded Oct. 29, 1944 (transfer by Bob Varney)

Jeanne-Marie Darré, piano; Orchestre National de la Radiodiffusion Française, Louis Fourestier, cond. EMI, recorded April 1955


AND A QUICK LOOK-BACK AT SAINT-SAËNS'S SECOND CONCERTO

(Which you'll recall we listened to in the April 2011 post "Who says a piano concerto has to be all this way or that way? Not Camille Saint-Saëns, for sure!")


At 88, Arthur Rubinstein plays the sparkling middle movement (Allegro scherzando) and the concluding Presto of Saint-Saëns's Piano Concerto No. 2 with André Previn conducting the London Symphony, in April 1975.


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