Piano Concerto No. 5 in F Major

By the age of 10, Saint-Saëns had already committed to memory a vast performing piano repertoire, and made it a point at the end of every recital to offer to play any one of Beethoven’s 32 sonatas as an encore. His creative facility was no less astonishing—he measured his production rate in days and weeks rather than months and years. As he succinctly put it, “I produce music as an apple tree produces apples.” One would not normally associate Saint-Saëns with the musically exotic (his opera Samson et Dalila excepted), yet the intoxicating sounds, colours and perfumes of Algiers, where he loved to spend the winter months in later life, left their mark on several works, most notably the Fifth Piano Concerto of 1896, known popularly as the “Egyptian”. The opening “Allegro animato” raises the curtain on a sunlit landscape, scorched by the soloist’s glistening virtuoso brilliance and suffused with radiant warmth and charm. The central “Andante” is more overtly Middle Eastern in outlook (despite the decidedly Hispanic opening bars), including a Nubian love song Saint-Saëns recalled being sung by boatmen on the Nile, and onomatopoeic suggestions of the sounds of frogs and crickets at dusk. According to the composer, the “Molto allegro” finale encapsulates “the joy of a sea-crossing, a joy that not everyone shares”, culminating in a high-kicking return to the boulevards of Paris.