The composer, virtuoso pianist, organist, critic and essayist Camille Saint-Saëns lived long enough to become a unique witness to an era of revolutionary changes in music. Recognised as a child prodigy by Gioacchino Rossini and Hector Berlioz, in his late years the author of Danse macabre had a chance to become acquainted with the early works of New Music. Atonality did not fire him with enthusiasm, which comes as no surprise, considering the fact that even Claude Debussy’s musical poetics proved quite alien to his tastes (Debussy felt the same about Saint-Saëns’ style). Extolled by Franz Liszt and the late Romantics, he was mostly dismissed by the modernists as eclectic and conservative. The appraisal was, however, far from unequivocal. From among eminent 20 th -century composers, both his pupil Gabriel Fauré and Fauré’s pupil Maurice Ravel admired Saint-Saëns, thus mapping out the lineage of the French Neoclassicism.

Anton Stepanovich Arensky and Sergei Eduardovich Bortkiewicz are hardly household names. Arensky’s delicious Piano Trio in D minor continues to keep its place on the fringes of the chamber repertoire, and the Waltz movement from his Suite for two pianos receives an occasional outing; otherwise nothing. Who has even heard of Bortkiewicz other than aficionados of the piano’s dustier repertoire?

Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (1809–1845) was a genius of quite extraordinary dimensions. He had reached full maturity as a composer by the age of sixteen (1825, the year of the String Octet), by which time he had also proved himself a double prodigy on both piano and violin, an exceptional athlete (and a particularly strong swimmer), a talented poet (Goethe was a childhood friend and confidante), multi-linguist, water-colourist, and philosopher. He excelled at virtually anything which could hold his attention for long enough, although it was music which above all activated his creative imagination.

A younger contemporary of Scriabin and Rachmaninov, Nikolai Medtner, a Russian of distant German descent, studied under Pabst, Sapelnikov and Safonov at the Moscow Conservatoire, graduating in 1900 with the coveted Anton Rubinstein Prize. Admired as a pianist of particularly formidable attainment and inventive imagination, he held important teaching appointments at the Conservatoire (1909/10, 1914/21) before eventually leaving Russia for periods of domicile in Germany, the USA and Paris. In the winter of 1935/36 he settled in England, making his home in the Golders Green area of north London.

Of the myriad piano concertos composed in the second half of the nineteenth century all but a handful are forgotten. The survivors are played with a regularity that borders on the monotonous—the ubiquitous Tchaikovsky No 1, the Grieg, Saint-Saëns’s Second (in G minor), the two by Brahms and, really, that is just about all there is on offer. Pianists, promoters and record companies play it safe and opt for the familiar. Even a masterpiece can become an unwelcome guest, especially when subjected to an unremarkable outing by yet another indifferent player, as happens so frequently today.