Saint-Saëns: Symphonic Poems - Le Carnaval des animaux - L'Assassinat du duc de Guise

When deep musicality and cultural awareness are coupled to period-instrument performance, the results are usually magical. That’s certainly the case here. Three of Saint-Saëns’s most famous scores—The Carnival of the Animals, the “Bacchanale” from Samson and Delila, and Danse macabre— are brought together with a selection of orchestral tone poems, and the composer’s score for the 1908 film L’Assassinat du Duc de Guise, one of the first to be written for cinema. Les Siècles and conductor François Xavier-Roth have stripped back these scores, each sounding as if a layer of grimy varnish has been removed. Danse macabre, often the victim of orchestral overload, proves enticingly fresh, the litheness of the orchestral sound revealing the composer’s orchestrations in scintillating detail. Carnival possesses all the charming wit you might expect from an animal-themed work written for close friends. The mythologically themed tone poems that open the album are beautifully rendered, technically accomplished with a restrained richness. Kudos to the recording engineers.