This month, WQXR is taking 30 pieces from the 2014 Classical Countdown and asking music experts to give us their "next step" compositions.
Countdown Piece: Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade
Countdown Position: No. 42
For a next step: Saint-Saëns’s Africa fantaisie for Piano and Orchestra, Op. 89
Choice by: Kristy Barbacane, a Musicologist at Barnard College who works on 19th-century French music and the relationship between colonialism and music
Recording available at Arkivmusic.com
If you enjoy Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade what's a good next step piece? We asked Barnard College musicologist Kristy Barbacane, who suggested Camille Saint-Saëns’s Africa fantaisie for piano and orchestra, op. 89 (1891).
"The imagined Orient has long fascinated composers and artists and was especially en vogue during the fin de siècle," writes Barbacane. "As the late Edward Said wrote, the Orient was a 'European invention... a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences.' Rimsky-Korsakov and Camille Saint-Saëns certainly explored these ideas in their repertoire.
"Beginning in 1873, Saint-Saëns began winter trips (hivernage) to Algiers, where the warm climate, natural surroundings, and solitude provided refuge from the cold weather and busy pace of life in Paris. Saint-Saëns was also eager to escape the demands of his own celebrity, and occasionally traveled under a pseudonym, Charles Sannois, to avoid recognition. Algeria and North Africa represented an escape to rest and relax. In one of his travelogues, the composer wrote upon leaving the port in Marseille, 'You board a beautiful ship and 24 hours later you land in Algiers; and it is sun, greenery, flowers, life!'”
In addition to its programmatic title, the Africa fantaisie contains a number of musical symbols for the Orient: percussive rhythms, chromatic melodies and raised intervals. There are also pastoral allusions, including bird-like figures (representing his Algiers garden) and a country fiddle playing a folk melody. The work concludes with what was then the Tunisian national anthem, known as the Beylical Anthem (purportedly written by another composer on WQXR’s Classical Countdown: Giuseppe Verdi!).
There's one other thing to listen for, notes Barbacane: "The virtuosic piano passages throughout the work highlight Saint-Saëns’s own prodigious keyboard skills, and it’s no surprise this was one of the composer’s favorite works to perform while on tour throughout North Africa and beyond."
Below: Listen to a recording of the piece featuring pianist Marc-André Hamelin: