Camille Saint-Saens - 6 Duos for harmonium and piano (Op.8)

Описание: "As found in Saint-Saens' Opus 1, this piece features that mainstay of Victorian drawing rooms – the Harmonium. The domestic organ that had quite a lot of music written for it at around this time, but precious little since. It has an interesting sound, making the piece worth a listen, despite it being so rarely performed.
One strange aspect of these pieces is what audience were they written for. The dedication of the pieces is to Louis Lefébure-Wély, the organist (and composer of many works for harmonium) who Saint-Saens replaced in 1858 (the year these duos were written) as chief organist of the Madeleine church in Paris. So, perhaps they were a goodbye present, designed to be played by Louis and Camille. But the pieces themselves veer between pieces of extremely simplicity that even a pretty untalented amateur could play, to pieces of extreme virtuosity that only a really technically excellent players could pull off.

0:00 - Fantasia e Fuga: Allegro moderato ma con fuoco -- Piu Allegro
6:37 - Cavatina: Andante con espressione, un poco adagio
11:59 - Chorale: Agitato
16:59 - Capriccio
20:01 - Scherzo: Presto
23:49 - Finale: Allegro molto -- A tempo -- Tempo 1 -- Piu mosso

The opening piece, is a case in point – an extensive Fantasia con Fuga. The Fantasia consisting of uniformly loud chord progressions in the harmonium accompanied by a veritable waterfall of rapid falling scales in the piano, which almost sound like practise scales. The fugue is a fairly dry and academic exercise in fugue, of the kind that Saint-Saens seemed prone to, making this movement an arguably mundane introduction

The second piece – a cavatina – is another simple piece for the players. Essentially a piano chorale, with a single line tune picked out on the harmonium, it's probably the most basic of the pieces.

The third movement is titled “Choral”, and it’s true there is a church hymn played on the harmonium in here (from a Rheinberger Organ Sonata, making it a reasonably well-known chorale tune), but most of the movement (marked agitato) consists of hushed drama of the piano playing in E minor with very rapidly shifting and clashing chords, like a Mendelssohnian scherzo. It’s possibly the most effective of the six pieces – not a typical Chorale. Certainly not easy to play for the pianist, but more interesting is the strange contrast between the piano’s agitato caffeine and the harmonium’s choral valium.

The fourth piece – a capriccio – sees the harmonium getting in on the action with a very jolly rapidly octave figure going on while the piano plays simply short staccato accompaniment (eventually this switches around) before the piece finishes quite amicably.

An Fsharp minor scherzo is the fifth piece – in the way that the cavatina was a chorale, and the chorale a scherzo, the scherzo is a tarantella – not too dissimilar than the recently composed Tarantelle Op.6. The piano has a tarantella phrase answered by a gentler chordal phrase on the harmonium, with a few flourishes to finish off.

Finally, the Finale. We start with a loud proclamation by the harmonium – joined and repeated by the piano and despite its pomposity it is effective in grabbing your attention after the scherzo. Then we are presented with a similar treatment as the opening Fantasia, with repeat scale like figures in the piano accompanying a series of chord progressions."
Complete Works of Camille Saint-Saens

Performed by Johannes Matthias and Ernst Breidenbach