Several recordings of the Saint-Saëns piano concertos in the late 2010s have made the neglect of these works by self-serving modernists seem almost criminally actionable. Which version you pick may be a matter of personal taste, but the restrained style of the young French pianist Romain Descharmes is especially commendable (with budget Naxos prices, to boot) here in the Piano Concerto No. 4 in C minor, Op. 44, a work that seems to look forward to neoclassicism decades before the fact. The work is formally one of a kind. It ...
Read More
Several recordings of the Saint-Saëns piano concertos in the late 2010s have made the neglect of these works by self-serving modernists seem almost criminally actionable. Which version you pick may be a matter of personal taste, but the restrained style of the young French pianist Romain Descharmes is especially commendable (with budget Naxos prices, to boot) here in the Piano Concerto No. 4 in C minor, Op. 44, a work that seems to look forward to neoclassicism decades before the fact. The work is formally one of a kind. It begins with a kind of Baroque binary dance tossed back and forth between orchestra and piano, and varied. The material then develops and darkens, only to evolve mysteriously into an Andante closing section that serves the function of the traditional slow movement but is fully woven into what has gone before. The second and final movement also has a tripartite structure. It's the formal wit of the neoclassicists that Saint-Saëns anticipates, and conductor Marc Soustrot, leading the...
Read Less
