Piano Concerto No. 2 in G Minor

Saint-Saëns was arguably music’s greatest polymath. Not only was he a gifted composer, virtuoso pianist, organist (Liszt considered him to have no equal), conductor and distinguished pedagogue, he was a consulted expert in a range of academic disciplines from archaeology to poetry, as well as a multilinguist with an aural and visual photographic memory. Like Mendelssohn, another polymathic genius who exerted a profound influence on him, Saint-Saëns found everything almost too easy. When, in the spring of 1868, touring Russian piano dignitary Anton Rubinstein announced his intention to make his Paris conducting debut with Saint-Saëns as soloist, the Frenchman instantly obliged by composing the Second and most popular of his piano concertos in just 17 days. Yet there is no sign of the extreme haste under which it was written, and it is brimming with original touches. The opening movement is highly unconventional—not only is it a slowish “Andante” (as opposed to the customary “Allegro”), but it starts with an extended, unaccompanied passage for the soloist that sounds like a J.S. Bach-style organ fantasia. Next, quite unexpectedly, comes a Mendelssohnian scherzo, whose playful gestures are ingeniously derived from the concerto’s opening motif, and to round things off, an Offenbach-style moto perpetuo romp, made all the more effective for being determinedly cast in a dour G minor.