Though chamber music is incontestably the least well-known component of his corpus, Camille Saint-Saëns was a master of the genre, leaving us with a large collection of works. We may think of Saint-Saëns as a conservative and very academic composer. And yet, we would be well advised to remember that he was, in fact, a pioneer. Even as a young man, Saint-Saëns delved into chamber music instead of opera, the conventional form for an up-and-coming musician. He composed chamber music throughout his life - through to the final woodwind sonatas in 1921 - restoring lustre to the form which, in France, had been all but forgotten. A driving force in the 19th century movement to reinvigorate the French school, Saint-Saëns paved the way for an entire generation of French musicians. This included his student Gabriel Fauré, who would go on to make an important contribution to the chamber music repertoire himself. These works embody the essence of Saint-Saëns’ composition: his lifelong and unyielding quest for perfection in form, and quality of the melodic line. It is fair to call Saint-Saëns a natural-born melodist, a true aesthete devoted to endowing a phrase with purity and beauty.
In 2021, what better way to celebrate the centennial of the composer’s death than to discover (or rediscover) this unfairly forgotten repertoire? For this recording of Saint-Saëns’ complete works for strings and piano - the first of its kind - I was joined by chamber musicians with a passion for rare music. In addition to the violin and cello duets that we are pleased to present in this first volume, two trios, two quartets and a quintet for piano were also composed.
Le Déluge Ensemble was founded in 2019 for this venture. Our name was inspired by Saint-Saëns’ homonymous oratorio and the radiant violin solo in the prelude that depicts the golden age of humanity. A version for piano written by the composer can be heard on this recording. © Laurent Wagschal/AdVitam Records