Saint-Saëns: Complete Piano Works, Vol. 3

Featuring

Geoffrey Burleson
Camille Saint-Saëns

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Compositional Technique

Camille Saint-Saëns possessed a great gift for using a bountiful palette of textures to conjure or imply places, scenes, and personalities in his music.

Composition History

Camille Saint-Saëns' choice of the 'bagatelle' genre for his debut piano compositions was unusual, as few significant composers had written in the form since Beethoven's Op. 126 Bagatelles 30 years prior.

Performer Biography

Geoffrey Burleson, the pianist on this album, is active as a recitalist, concerto soloist, chamber musician, and jazz performer, and teaches piano at Princeton University and Hunter College-City University of New York.

Composition History

The Six Bagatelles, Op. 3, Camille Saint-Saëns' first published piano compositions, were written in 1855 when he was only twenty years old.

Composer Biography

Franz Liszt, a renowned Hungarian composer and virtuoso pianist, once referred to Camille Saint-Saëns as the greatest organist on earth.

Composer Biography

Camille Saint-Saëns, a seminal figure in French Romantic music, was a keyboard prodigy who at age ten offered to play any of Beethoven's 32 sonatas as an encore.

Composer's Artistic Vision

Camille Saint-Saëns was a composer of contradictions, valuing traditional formal structures like fugues and sonatas while also writing pieces that evoked extramusical subjects.