Piano Trio No. 2 in E Minor

Saint-Saëns’ Piano Trio No. 2 is unquestionably one of the composer’s finest chamber works. It was written in 1892 at a time when Saint-Saëns felt marginalised from the French mainstream, which had become increasingly enamoured of the revolutionary musical outlook of Wagner. Saint-Saëns, however, railed against this tendency, declaring his steadfast admiration for earlier Romantics such as Schumann and Felix Mendelssohn. Yet this Piano Trio No. 2 is by no means a backward-looking work. Almost everything about it is unusual, not least its five-movement structure, which anticipates the arch forms favoured by 20th-century masters such as Bartók and Hindemith. Furthermore, the first, third and fifth movements explore levels of emotional intensity rarely encountered elsewhere in Saint-Saëns’ output. There are surprises in store elsewhere in the work, in particular in the second movement, “Allegretto”, whose unconventional time signature of five beats to a bar creates a fragile and occasionally disorientating effect on the listener.