Once dubbed "The French Mendelssohn", Camille Saint-Saëns grew to value music over words. Over the course of his lifetime, he produced numerous transcriptions of JS Bach's works. Tonight, we hear his arrangement of Bach's Auch mit gedämpften, schwachen Stimmen for solo piano.  Drawing upon inspiration from past eras, this programme also features the six "H-A-Y-D-N commissions" by Hahn, Debussy, D'Indy, Dukas, Widor, and Ravel, as commissioned by the musicologist Jules Ecorcheville for his journal Revue musicale SIM to mark the centenary of Haydn's death in 1909. 

In the second half, we hear Reynaldo Hahn's Chanson Grises. This song cycle is set to poetry from Paul Verlaine's Fêtes galantes whose title nods towards the "Fête champêtre", a term coined by the Académie Royale in Paris in 1717 to describe the French baroque painter Jean-Antoine Watteau's depictions of elegantly dressed men and women engaging in amourous play in beautifully idealised outdoor settings. We hear birdsong in Le Rappel des Oiseaux by Rameau, who Saint-Saëns referred to as "the great musical genius that France has ever produced", and the evening concludes with echoes of Couperin in Ravel's well-known Tombeau