PIANIST'S CONCERTO

New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 811, 11 February 1955, Page 19

PIANIST'S CONCERTO

"(CAMILLE ST. SAENS was racked with pains, when people addressed him as ‘Saint Sains," quipped Ogden Nash. M. St. Saens might be a little more racked if he knew what people sometimes say about his music these days. His status is rather like that of a guest at a’*party whose prestige has been outshone by late arrivals in the same line of business: This week the Orchestra’is sequestered in its Wellington rehearsal room, running its fingers over new works for next week’s Auckland Prom season. One of the pieces the players may be looking into with James Robertson is SaintSaens’s Concerto No. 2 in G Minor for Piano and Orchestra, in which the soloist will be Jocelyn Walker (1YC, February 25). Saint-Saens was a successful musician; successful, that is, if you count scholarship, technical mastery and. wit as 5 eninacadients, and popular acclaim "criterion. When he died at the ‘of 81-it: is astonishing to realise that so 19th Century a character should have lived on until 1921-he was amoung the most admired and_ respected of French composers. Yet for all his learning, skill and elegance. there was some-

thing missing in his musical. make-up. There is a story told that when a musician was asked to identify an anonymously introduced composition, he immediately pronounced it as one of Saint-Saens. He recognised it, he said, because "the first movement sounded like Schumann, the second like Mendelssohn and the third like Franck-but none of these three wrote for the. musichall.’ This is a little unkind to Saint-Saens who; always writing music that

contemporary audiences liked, nevertheless hit off the taste of his time with considerable technical accomplishment and sophisticated polish. The beauties of Saint-Saens’s music as Alfred Cortot praised them, are characterised by "neat and even brilliant rhythms, more intelligence than sensibility, more verve than feeling," and if all this doesn’t send you to the skies or rock the foundations of your listening, it is at least very cheering. The Concerto in G Minor is a pianist’s concerto. It shows off the piano, providing opportunity for the instrument to sing, to coo meltingly and to fire off fanfares of exuberant passage work, The stage is set right at the beginning when the piano, disdaining traditions of form, asserts itself with the opening cadenza-like fantasia. The Orchestra is allowed a subsequent eight bars to announce its presence before the soloist brings in the main theme. This is all very unusual; or®at least it was when Saint-Saens tossed it off-he wrote the whole concerto in seventeen days. More unusual it becomes when you discover. that after all this is the slow

movement, despite the piano’s occasional gay fling. Things settle down to the accustomed in the next movement, when the timpani_ establishes the rhythm. At no stage is the Piano encouraged to be modest. If you’re not looking for philosopby ir this music and can erjoy a little pianistic exhibitionism, Saint-Saens’s second piano concerto is as good clean fun as you'll find in any symphonic _ programme. -QOwen Jensen