Cellist Steven Isserlis, curator of this year’s Sheffield Chamber Music Festival, laid his cards on the table from the outset, billing this concert as ‘Saint-Saëns: The Renaissance Man’. Quite a claim. Isserlis, of course, has form in this area, dating back to the major Saint-Saëns festival he put together in London 20 years ago. The works performed here by the vastly-expanded forces of Ensemble 360 allowed the Sheffield audience to assess the range of Saint-Saëns’ musical ventriloquism, even if other aspects of his abilities as a polymath (poet, playwright, philosopher) remained necessarily unexamined. It was, truthfully, a remarkable concert that will live long in the memory, notably for the performance of the film score Saint-Saëns wrote for L’assassinat du duc de Guise, played to accompany a screening.
The 1908 film itself is a remarkable thing, a serious French treatment of a historical event, a far cry from the ‘cinema as comic novelty’ that held sway in the USA. And the music? Well, I’d have to confess that immediately afterwards I could recall no memorable themes (a view confirmed by subsequently listening to an audio recording) but as a contribution to a multi-media spectacle, Saint-Saëns’ music fitted the ebb and flow of the narrative perfectly, from the gentle domesticity of the early scene of the Duc de Guise and his mistress to the sinewy chromatic string writing of the assassination scene itself. The 13 players crammed onto the Crucible Playhouse's postage stamp of a stage under the expert baton of local conductor George Morton played with gusto and synchronised precision.
That would have been the star turn of the evening were it not for what followed, the “imperishable jewel” (Isserlis’ words) that is The Carnival of the Animals. One of the criticisms levelled at Saint-Saëns is that his music rarely offers a glimpse into his soul, but its very impersonality was his raison d'être as a composer; his goal was to make beautiful music, in an array of diverse voices. The Carnival of the Animals takes that to the extreme. This performance was thrilling, every musician having a turn or two in the spotlight in superbly characterised vignettes. It seems unfair to single out some for special mention, but Benjamin Nabarro and Claudia Ajmone Marsan were wonderfully mournful as a pair of Characters with Long Ears, and guest double bass player Philip Nelson delivered a compellingly and comically deadpan solo in The Elephant, transfiguring Berlioz’ Dance of the Sylphs in the process. And in case the work should seem merely superficial, Gemma Rosefield imbued the cello melody in The Swan with reverence.
The first half of the programme was, in hindsight, rather overshadowed, though horn player Naomi Atherton and pianist Tim Horton breezed through the colourful changes of mood in the Morceau de Concert, before guest bassoonist Ursula Leveaux made a powerful case for Saint-Saëns’ very late Bassoon Sonata in G major. Saint-Saëns’ three final wind sonatas, like those of Poulenc later in the century, are a beautiful summary of a lifetime’s compositional experience, and in this, the last of the three, the bassoon is liberated to be more than just its usual bumbling, grumbling stereotype. Leveaux was flighty and playful in the Allegro scherzando middle movement, and then profound and, one might claim, philosophical in the Molto adagio opening to the finale. There was even space for that oddity, the grand marche that Saint-Saëns called Les Odeurs de Paris. To have heard it once in a lifetime, though, is quite enough.
