Sunday Classics: Who says a piano concerto has to be all this way or that way? Not Camille Saint-Saëns, for sure!

Movement "B" (plus, for reasons I can't explain, the opening of the following movement), played by pianist Nelson Freire, with the Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana conducted by David Shallon

by Ken

If you were with us in Friday night's and last night's previews, you know we've been listening to two piano-concerto movements, about as different as piano-concerto movements get, and now you know the CD that's had me listening to and thinking about them.

If you didn't know the identity of the music in question, if you just looked closely at the photo I posted last night of the jacket of the original RCA Arthur Rubinstein Heart of the Piano Concerto LP, which I told you was where I first encountered our Movement "B" (we even heard that very performance!), from the list of composers you shouldn't have had much difficulty picking out Charles Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921) as the composer of this supremely scintillating music.

Since the Testament Gilels CD cover is frustratingly vague about the actual contents of the disc, I can tell you that the Saint-Saëns concertos it contains is the Second, and Movement "B" is the middle movement, marked appropriately Allegro scherzando. For a lazy Sunday, I thought it might be pleasant to hear both Gilels and Rubinstein play it again, this time leading right into the suitably volatile, worry-free finale.


TO FINISH UNRAVELING THE SECRETS
OF MOVEMENTS "A" AND "B," CLICK HERE

The Gilels CD that started all the trouble

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