**

Good evening Ladies and Gentlemen, Mesdames et Messieurs, bonsoir, and welcome to a

brand new Orchestra of the City season.

Huge thanks to the brilliant Rob Burton for his magnificent and beautiful playing.

We have a great season coming up; Prokofiev, Walton, Mendelssohn, Shostakovich, and so

on; in our next concert in December we welcome one of the country’s most exciting

sopranos, Nadine Benjamin and her unbelievable voice, and we tackle Bartok’s insanely cool

Concerto for Orchestra.

And as if that wasn’t enough, we’re also going to play some music from Superman, primarily

so that you can also see Eli’s husband fulfil his promise to us of wearing his Superman

Christmas jumper and pyjamas to the concert. I’m working on securing funding for some

kind of pulley system as well to launch him across the room through a volley of indoor

fireworks, so watch this space.

Now, back to a quite extraordinary composer. Saint-SaënS wrote his first piece aged 3, made

his debut at 5 playing a Beethoven sonata, won virtually every French prize and honour going

and had one of the longest and most prolific careers of any composer: a phenomenal organ

virtuoso, the first major composer to score a film, in fact, quite incredibly for someone born in

! 1835, you can go to youtube and watch him conducting and playing the piano beautifully.
His so called ‘Organ’ Symphony, number 3, was actually premiered, with Saint SaenS

conducting, just on the corner of Piccadilly and Regents street, up there in what used to be

St. James’ Hall. There is one unifying theme which holds the piece together and which I’m

not going to call the ‘Babe: Sheep-pig’ theme, but you will recognise it when it arrives in full

glory in the last movement. You might be forgiven for having missed a few of its previous

incursions throughout the symphony. Here we are at the beginning, after a short mysterious

opening, this bustling in the strings:

Extract 1: 1st movement, Bar 12 for 3 bars

Seems innocuous, but already Saint SaenS is planting subliminal music seeds in your brain.

Before it gets too obvious though he gives us a second theme, melodic, interesting and

excitable, here it is in it’s resting state:

Extract 2: 1st movement, bar 102 for 6 bars

The woodwind get a few goes at this melody too, but here while the while they beguile you,

keep an ear out also for the Ernst Blofeld-like trombones, subtly, or not, continuing their

plans for world domination by gently brainwashing you with their pre-shadowing of the

‘What I’m not going to call Sheep-pig’ theme. (Couple of beers in by now)

Extract 3: 1st movement, bar 122 for 6 bars

What’s most interesting really though is not that you are being conditioned into accepting

this ‘What I’m not going to call Sheep-pig’ theme, but the way that Saint SaenS tells a

compelling musical story with these themes we’ve just played. Sometimes full and luscious,

sometimes anxious, sometimes as here chopped into fragments that trip over each other in

competition to come out on top, it never sits still:

Extract 4: 1st movement, bar 205 for 10 bars

The excitement dies down eventually and we end up in the what-I-call-Second movement

(which is really part of a long first movement). It is a moment of calm in the midst of

madness, slow and built around this beautiful melody:

Extract 5: 1st movement, bar 366 for a few bars

You’ll get the whole thing shortly, complete with delicate organ support. Don’t get too

comfortable though, it’s not the most subtle of its intrusions, but that ‘What I’m not going

to call Sheep-pig’ theme is lurking, prodding your hippocampus like ..

Extract 6: 1st movement, bar 424 for 2 bars

Eye of the storm behind us, we plough on into the Big number 2, for want of a better

phrase; what Saint SaenS calls the second movement, but what contemporary listeners

would probably have understood as a third movement, it veers between wild and

hyperactive. Here is the beginning:

Extract 7: Start of Big Number 2 for 6 bars or so

This is a whirlwind of a movement, frantic for everyone including some typically virtuosic

piano flourishes. It runs out of steam eventually and just as we’re all starting to relax, Peter

decides to turn the organ up to 11 and wakes us all up. What follows, I’m not even going to

attempt to introduce, except to say that all the musical seeds have been planted and as they

come to fruition complete with triple wind (that’s not a reference to flatulence), two

pianists, organ, percussion and all the rest, this monster of a symphony comes to a huge and

satisfying end.