Cello and piano, dialogues

The Palazzetto Bru Zane opens the season with Festival Camille Saint-Saëns, the one-man band

Although the piano quintet is generally associated with the German Romantic school (from Schumann to Brahms), Camille Saint-Saëns’s career refutes this prejudice. As a composer, he delivered the genre’s first important milestone in France in 1855, when he was only twenty years old. As head of the Société Nationale de Musique, he then opened up a space for his contemporaries to publicly perform this type of work, which until then had remained confined to the discretion of the salons. Finally, as a performer, he devoted his pianistic virtuosity to the most ambitious pieces of his time, such as César Franck’s Quintet, which he premiered in 1880.