The Violin Concerto No. 2 is an early work, composed in 1858 when Saint-Saëns was but 23 years of age and before he developed his distinctive and easily recognizable style. The music, comprised of rather generalized 19th century romantic melodic material, drops frequent hints of Mendelssohn and Schumann, though the finale brings to mind Beethoven’s violin concerto. Saint-Saëns employs super-virtuoso solo writing in the Paganini vein, especially in the first movement, a fleet and buoyant Allegro maestoso. Jean-Jacques Kantorow takes on the dizzying solo part with great relish, tossing off the leaping intervals and rapid fireworks as if the piece were written especially for him. Tuomas Ollila brings a sense of excited discovery to the orchestral accompaniment, played deftly by the Tapiola Sinfonietta.
Ollila also leads an involving performance of the Spartacus overture, however in this case Tapiola’s small ensemble sound, with its thin string section and mincing, “authentic”-style phrasing and articulation, doesn’t yield sufficient tonal heft for this dramatic work, composed five years after the concerto. Saint-Saëns creates an amalgam of the Mendelssohnian overture and the Lisztian symphonic poem (even quoting the main motif from Liszt’s Hunnenschlact), resulting in an invigorating orchestral showpiece that foreshadows the brilliance of the composer’s later essays in the form.
Lastly, we jump ahead to 1910 (Saint-Saëns had a particularly long life and career) for La Muse et le poète, a brief double concerto so named by the composer’s publisher Durand supposedly in response to the vivid imagery generated by the quarrelsome and finally conciliatory interplay between the violin (muse) and cello (poet). Kantorow conducts as well as plays, and is joined by Torleif Thedéen in a warmly ingratiating performance of this tender and poignant work. The recorded sound is a mite bright and shallow (unusual for a BIS production), but believably balanced, with plenty of impact.
