It was appropriate that the Wigmore Hall's Saint-Saëns festival should end with the British premiere of one of his most frivolous pieces, Les Odeurs de Paris. The performance featured the cream of Britain's chamber-music talent imitating a menagerie of birds and insects on toy percussion instruments: cellist Steven Isserlis was a warbling nightingale, violinist Anthony Marwood an enthusiastic cuckoo and pianist Graham Johnson a militaristic drummer. It was a frothy conclusion to a light-hearted programme which did little to dispel the idea that Saint-Saëns was a composer of brilliant surfaces, whose music rarely plumbs the depths of human experience.
The programme re-created the heady atmosphere of a 19th-century Parisian salon, enhanced by Simon Butteriss's theatrical narration of Saint-Saëns's reminiscences. No musical soirée was complete without a harmonium, and Saint-Saëns created a repertoire of chamber pieces for the instrument that are almost unknown today. Played by Thomas Wilson, the harmonium partnered Nicola Eimer's glittering piano in a grandiose Fantasie and Fugue, supported Marwood's violin line in a shimmering Barcarolle and even provided a sensuous accompaniment for tenor Benjamin Hulett's performance of Vogue, Vogue.
The expressive range of these delightful divertissements was decidedly narrow. Even when the music invoked sadness or melancholy, as in Isserlis's performance of a Prière for cello and harmonium, the effect was cool and reflective rather than emotional. But that coolness was also its charm: the clarity of the famous Septet - especially in the dazzling performance by Marwood, pianist Pascal Devoyon and musicians from the Royal Academy - revealed the directness of Saint-Saëns's music.
There was nothing by Saint-Saëns on the whole programme that had the harmonic subtlety of the opening phrase of a song by Gabriel Fauré, Pleurs d'Or, sung with tenderness by Hulett and soprano Lucy Crowe. However, in music such as his Romance for violin, piano, and harmonium, Saint-Saëns creates a musical language that is unmistakable in its disarming immediacy, a realisation of his credo: "the great distinction of simplicity".
