Camille Saint-Saens - Six Bagatelles (Op.3)

"There’s a rather cruel summary of Saint-Saens as a composer that ‘he wrote bad music well’. My feeling is that Saint-Saens’s best music is his simplest. These bagatelles seem to me to capture the above criticism however.
The first mixes chromatic chords with stretches of canon in a vaguely yearning fashion, but without ever really feeling it’s going anywhere (all six bagatelles sound like they may have originated from improvisations, which Saint-Saens was
The word ‘bagatelle’ means a ‘trifle’, and the second of the set would certainly fit that description, sounding much like a rapid introduction to a vaudeville act as imagined by Schumann. It’s blink and you miss it stuff.
The third and fourth bagatelles bring the mood down. No. 3 having a gentle rocking figure in the high treble register whilst a really simple tune runs through the left hand at a sedate pace. No. 4 meanwhile is even more static, being a chorale like tune in F major which, like a disappointing G&T, is too heavily based around the tonic.
The fifth bagatelle is more scherzo-like, vaguely reminiscent of Saint-Saens’s Mendelssohn aping style, with rapid D minor (with liberal sprinkles of G sharps and B flats) staccato arpeggios.
The biggest bagatelles is the final one, which starts off repeating the entry to the first bagatelle, before veering off into a much more interesting and affecting G major tune that is given two or three variations (of increasing technically complexity), before bring the whole thing to a sedate conclusion. Saint-Saens liked this particular bagatelle sufficiently greatly to 30 years later transcribe it for violin and piano and publish it.
The bagatelles were dedicated to a chap called Libon, who left Saint-Saens 100,000 francs in his will. So, for the struggling composer out there, write six moderately unremarkable piano pieces for an obscenely wealthy individual and you’ll be sorted."

The Complete Works of Camille Saint-Saens

Видео Camille Saint-Saens - Six Bagatelles (Op.3) канала Sohan Kalirai