Spotlight Festival 2025

What are you going to listen to?

Saint-Saëns

"Music is not exclusively a source of sensual pleasure and ardent emotion. He who takes no pleasure in purely organized harmonies does not really love music," Camille Saint-Saëns wrote in his memoir École buissonnière. His long career spanned the heyday of Romanticism to the rise of modernism, which he viewed with horror. After the premiere of Stravinsky's Le sacre du printemps, he was aghast. Yet in his younger years, Saint-Saëns was an advocate of such innovators as Berlioz, Liszt and Wagner.

Saint-Saëns revitalized French music by reverting to classical forms such as the symphony and the concerto. He was a classicist among the Romantics, with a preference for clarity, elegance and structure. His music was sometimes perceived as cool and distant, but later critics actually discovered charm and refinement in his work.

His oeuvre is vast and multifaceted, from opera to chamber music. Especially popular are his concertos for piano, violin and cello. The First Cello Concerto from 1872 is one of his most popular works. It consists of three movements that flow into each other without interruption and forms a tight musical unit. The form is clear and balanced, with a minuet as the middle movement and a finale that harkens back to the beginning. It is a work in which Saint-Saëns clearly shows his preference for form over romantic exuberance.

Mendelssohn

Felix Mendelssohn was another composer who was able to combine classical forms with romantic expression. His Scottish symphony came about after a trip through Scotland in 1829, where he was deeply impressed by its rugged nature and historic ruins. Although he denied that Scottish folk music was incorporated into the symphony, the work exudes the atmosphere of the landscape.

Mendelssohn did not complete the symphony until 1842 and conducted the premiere himself in Berlin. Shortly thereafter, he brought the work to London. The symphony's four movements flow into each other and end in a radiant hymn. It is one of the highlights of early Romanticism, in which Mendelssohn fully expresses his talent for musical landscape painting.