Composer: Camille Saint-Saëns
Piece: Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso in A minor
Performers: Ray Chen with the Malta Philharmonic Orchestra
Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns 9 October 1835 - 16 December 1921) was a French composer, organist, conductor and pianist of the Romantic era. His best-known works include Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso (1863), the Second Piano Concerto (1868), the First Cello Concerto (1872), Danse macabre (1874), the opera Samson and Delilah (1877), the Third Violin Concerto (1880), the Third ("Organ") Symphony (1886) and The Carnival of the Animals (1886). Saint-Saëns was a musical prodigy; he made his concert debut at the age of ten. After studying at the Paris Conservatoire he followed a conventional career as a church organist, first at Saint-Merri, Paris and, from 1858, La Madeleine, the official church of the French Empire. After leaving the post twenty years later, he was a successful freelance pianist and composer, in demand in Europe and the Americas. As a young man, Saint-Saëns was enthusiastic for the most modern music of the day, particularly that of Schumann, Liszt and Wagner, although his own compositions were generally within a conventional classical tradition. He was a scholar of musical history, and remained committed to the structures worked out by earlier French composers. This brought him into conflict in his later years with composers of the impressionist and expressionist schools of music; although there were neoclassical elements in his music, foreshadowing works by Stravinsky and Les Six, he was often regarded as a reactionary in the decades around the time of his death. Saint-Saëns held only one teaching post, at the École de Musique Classique et Religieuse in Paris, and remained there for less than five years. It was nevertheless important in the development of French music: his students included Gabriel Fauré, among whose own later pupils was Maurice Ravel. Both of them were strongly influenced by Saint-Saëns, whom they revered as a genius.
The Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso in A minor (French: Introduction et Rondo capriccioso), Op. 28, is a composition for violin and orchestra written in 1863 by Camille Saint-Saëns. It was dedicated to the virtuoso violinist Pablo de Sarasate, who performed the solo violin part at the premiere in April 1867. The Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso was originally intended to be the rousing finale to Saint-Saëns' first violin concerto, Op. 20, though its success as a solo composition at its first performance led Saint-Saëns to publish it separately. The premiere took place on 4 April 1867 at the Champs-Élysées, with Pablo de Sarasate playing the solo part and the composer conducting. Several arrangements of the score have been made, including for violin and piano by Georges Bizet, piano duet by Jacques Durand, and two pianos by Claude Debussy.
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6 сен 2024
