Camille Saint-Saëns, this season’s key personality, will also occupy a central place in the Festival Palazzetto Bru Zane Paris. The inaugural evening will feature his ‘Organ’ Symphony, no.3, and the oratorio The Promised Land with the Orchestre National du Capitole de Toulouse. This will be followed by a ‘Saint-Saëns Gala’ assembling all four of his symphonic poems, performed by Les Siècles under the direction of François-Xavier Roth, alongside concertante works with the violinist Renaud Capuçon and the pianist Bertrand Chamayou. The Auditorium du Louvre will host two concerts of his chamber music as well as a concert version of Phryné, Saint-Saëns’s only opéra-comique, here adorned with recitatives by André Messager.
This edition will spotlight sacred music, with a concert at the Chapelle Royale in Versailles on 8 June combining Paisiello’s Mass for the Coronation of Napoleon with an unpublished Parisian variant of Mozart’s Requiem. One of the most successful operettas of the late nineteenth century, Lecocq’s irresistible La Fille de Madame Angot, will be given a concert performance, in the version of its 1872 Brussels premiere, at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées on 20 June. On 1 July at the Auditorium de Radio France, the final event of the festival will focus on orchestral works by female composers, played by the Orchestre National de France under the direction of Debora Waldman. Raphaël Perraud will join them in the Cello Concerto of Marie Jaëll.