Camille Saint-Saëns News
French composer, organist, conductor and pianist
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Commemorations 2025 (Birth: Camille Saint-Saëns)
- piano, violin, pipe organ
- opera, symphony, classical music, concerto
- France
- composer, organist, conductor, pianist, music critic
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2024-03-19
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2024-03-16 09:57:00
From Early Music to contemporary: the Royal Festival Hall organ is 70 and organist James McVinnie is celebrating with a Southbank Centre residency
James McVinnie performing at the Royal Festival Hall organ with Bedroom Community - Sept 2015The Royal Festival Hall organ is 70. Built from 1950–1954 to the specification of the London County Council's consultant, Ralph Downes, it was restored and re-configured by Harrison & Harrison as part of the hall's reconstruction during 2005-2007 and it was re-inaugurated on its 60th anniversary in March 2014. Now, to celebrate the instrument's 70th birthday, organist James McVinnie has a residency at the Southbank Centre featuring organ recitals including a wide range of repertoire as well as an appearance by the James McVinnie Ensemble.Though James had played the organ once before the rebuild, he was not familiar with it until he came to play it as part of the 2014 celebrations. But he spent two years as an organ scholar at St Albans Cathedral where the organ was also designed by Ralph Downes and built […]
2024-03-12 09:19:00
It's back: Classical Pride returns to the Barbican with a five celebration of LGBTQ+ composers and artists
After a debut last year, Classical Pride, artistic director Oliver Zeffman is back with a five-day festival from 3 to 7 July 2024, showcasing the breadth, diversity and depth of talent of LGBTQ+ composers and artists, past, present and future.The centre piece of the festival is a concert at the Barbican Hall where Oliver Zeffman conducts the London Symphony Orchestra in programme featuring a new commission from Jake Heggie with soprano Pumeza Matshikiza, Cassandra Miller's Round, Szymanowski’s Symphony No. 3, ‘Song of the Night’, with tenor soloist Russell Thomas and LGBTQ+ Community Choir, Saint-Saens' Piano Concerto No. 2 with Pavel Kolesnikov and music by Tchaikovsky and Copland.At Milton Court Concert Hall, the Fourth Choir, conductor Nicholas Chalmers will be focusing on the relationship between Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears in My Beloved Man featuring music by Britten, Barber, Imogen Holst, Barber and more.There is a free performance of Julius Eastman’s […]
2024-03-07 23:30:37
Talking about great classical music that’s family-friendly? You have to talk about The Carnival of the Animals. Almost a 140 years after Camille Saint-Saëns composed his Le Carnival des animaux, it’s astonishing to note that this appealing, colorful work—one of the composer’s most popular—nearly died with him. Saint-Saëns was one of classical music’s most accomplished scene-painters; the animal caricatures in this glorious carnival are astonishingly vivid and often hilarious, delighting children and grownups in equal measure. After hearing The Carnival of the Animals, watching animals in the zoo or tropical fish in your home aquarium will seem very different and much more fun....
2024-03-02 09:03:00
Shamus O'Brien: withdrawn by the composer for political reasons, Stanford's most popular opera languished in the 20th century but all that seems set to change
Retrospect Opera's recording of Stanford's Shamus O'Brien in rehearsalCharles Villiers Stanford’s opera Shamus O'Brien premiered in 1896 in London. It was easily his most popular opera, running for over 80 performances in the West End before going on an extensive tour in Britain and Ireland, then in 1897 it also enjoyed a two-month run in New York. An explicitly Irish work, set against the backdrop of the Irish Rebellion of 1798, Stanford withdrew the opera shortly before the First World War. As the politics of Home Rule intensified in the 1910s, Stanford, an ardent Unionist, worried that the opera might foment Irish nationalism and anti-English sentiment; the ban effectively remained in place until his death in March 1924.King Baggot and Vivian Prescott in the 1912 silent film Shamus O'BrienBut after that, the opera returned to the stage and was broadcast by the BBC in the 1930s. Since then the work has […]
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