His Carnival of the Animals is widely played and loved, but there’s a great, great deal more to Camille Saint-Saëns. As the Proms marks his centenary, we salute a composer of wit and compression who ...

“For hours after Jean-Philippe Collard had left Camille Saint-Saëns’ Fifth Piano Concerto a pile of shards on the Hollywood Bowl stage,” Alan Rich wrote in L.A. Weekly in the summer of 1999, “I racked ...

Lions, swans, donkeys and… pianists? Here are all 14 movements of The Carnival of the Animals, and what they’re about. The French composer Camille Saint-Saëns took himself quite seriously. So ...

Poor Saint-Saëns! He was blessed from childhood with a polished facility of utterance that made most of his fellow composers (Ravel excepted) seem like hysterical tyros by comparison. But somehow, ...

There's much more to Saint-Saëns than the Carnival of the Animals, as these outstanding recordings amply demonstrate... Read more Saint-Saëns was one of the most remarkable prodigies in the history of ...

As far as Saint-Saëns is concerned, the two big works of 1886 were the Organ Symphony and the Carnival of the Animals. It's one of his most popular works, but Saint-Saëns premiered his ‘grand ...

"What's wrong with Saint-Saëns? We love it!" That was the retort that the cellist Steven Isserlis and four musician friends offered with one voice when their dining companion, a manager, declared ...

Saint-Saens SonataIn addition to big, thick music for orchestra, Camille Saint-Saens also wrote a lot of charming chamber music. Violinist Andres Cardenes plays the last movement from Saint-Saens' ...

From the classical archive, 27 April 1909: Camille Saint-Saëns tells the Observer why he has Queen Alexandra to thank for the lifting of a ban on productions of Samson et Dalila The Opera at Covent ...

Halloween music has gone much the way of the holiday over the decades: accumulating camp and kitsch, confectionary fun, friendly monster-on-monster romping, and a sort of innocence that has made the ...

“For hours after Jean-Philippe Collard had left Camille Saint-Saëns’ Fifth Piano Concerto a pile of shards on the Hollywood Bowl stage,” Alan Rich wrote in L.A. Weekly in the summer of 1999, "I racked ...