Cello Concerto No.2 in D Minor, op.119
performed May 12, 2002

A lot of composers began as freakish children, but by any standards Saint-Saëns was an extreme case. As a two-year-old he could read and write, and was picking out melodies on the piano. Shortly after his third birthday he began conmposing, and by the age of five had given his first piano recital. At seven he was reading Latin, studying botany and developing what was to become an eighty-year interest in lepidoptery, (the study of butterflies and moths). As an encore after his formal debut as a concert pianist, the 10-year-old Camille offered to play any of Beethoven's 32 sonoatas from memory. In short, his childhood suggested Mozartian potential that was never realized. Saint-Saëns once remarked that he lived "in music like a fish in water" and that composing was as natural as "an apple tree producing apples." And there lay the problem. As with Mendelssohn, the technique came so easily to him that it virtually extinguished the spark of originality.

That said, for many years he was considered by many to be France's greatest musical revolutionary, though his reputation grew more from his outspoken support for other composers' music -especially Wagner's- than from any work of his own. As well as promoting comtemporary music, Saint-Saëns threw his energies into researching the work of his forerunners. Along with Mendelssohn, he was one of the first to reestablish the music of Bach (converting the skeptical Berlioz in the process) and he did much to restore Mozart to his rightful place, being the first to play a complete cycle of the piano concerti. Handel was another unfashionable composer to engage Saint-Saëns' attention, and (as with Berlioz) Gluck held a fascination that lasted most of his life.

By the time Saint-Saëns reached his mid-fifties, the past had won the upper hand over the present. Embittered, ill-tempered and restless, he became the arch-traditionalist, opposing the progressive music of Debussy and Ravel, bellowing outrage at the first performance of The Rite of Spring, and yet, for all his reactionary pomposity, he was one of the first neo-classicists, embodying many of the finest traditional qualities of French music - neatness, clarity, elegance and dignity. His best epitaph is the rueful one he wrote for himself: "I ran after the chimera of purity of style and perfection of form."

Nearly thirty years passed between the coposition of the First Saint-Saëns cello concerto and that of the Second, which appeared in 1902. The Saint-Saëns D Minor Concerto, written for the Dutch cellist Joseph Hollmann is a slighter work than its celebrated predecessor, but far too attractive to suffer the neglect under which it has languished for so many years, totally ignored in our concert halls. When Saint-Saëns wrote his Second Cello Concerto, he was at the height of his fame. A reaction to his music had already set in, however, and one critic at the time described the new concerto as "de la mauvaise musique bien écrite." In other words, while its ideas may not be profound they are treated with all the technical brilliance and cunning of which Saint-Saëns was a past master. Such are the acrobatics demanded of the player that his part is written on two staves, and the layout often calls for the type of heroic exertions needed to play Bach's solo cello works. One listens with something of the apprehension felt on watching a death-defying trapeze artist. Saint-Saëns even described the work as "too difficult." It's all good fun, and at the age of sixty-seven Saint-Saëns proved that he could still be as impetuous and unexpected in his music as when he was twenty.

The d minor Concerto is in two movements, the first of which, as in various of Saint-Saëns' other works, combines an opening Allegro with a fully developed slow movement; in this case the Allegro moderato e maestoso is reprised following the Andante sostenuto, by way of emphasizing that this is a single movement and not two separate movements played without pause. The second movement is a conventional finale, Allegro non troppo, the materialin which reflect Saint-Saëns' characteristic vigor, wit, and controlled exoticism as he entered the final years of his seventh decade.