Unlike
Saint-Saëns' music for cello and orchestra, the three works for cello and piano on this album aren't much heard. That's odd, given the relative sparsity of solo repertoire in general, and given that the music here is entirely characteristic of its composer. Whether the average listener will enjoy it will depend on his or her attitude toward the exquisitely detailed but essentially conservative and somehow reserved music of
Saint-Saëns in general. Two of the three works here were composed early in
Saint-Saëns' career. He was sometimes compared with
Mendelssohn during his lifetime, and in the Sonata No. 1 in C minor for cello and piano, Op. 32, and especially the Suite for cello and piano, Op. 16, one can see why: the straightforwardly melodic but heavily embroidered structures of the suite's five movements do bring
Mendelssohn to mind. One could hardly ask for a better performance of these works. Balance is always a key issue in works for the cello, and cellist
Maria Kliegel and pianist
François-Joël Thiollier are alert throughout to the ways in which the composer solves this technical problem. In movements such as the scherzo with variations in the Sonata No. 2 in F major, Op. 123, they manage the trick of keeping the cello in the foreground despite a very active piano part. The DeutschlandRadio sound helps bring out the clarity the performers achieve, and the result is an hour and a quarter of
Saint-Saëns that Parisians of a century ago might have enjoyed.