The most complete collection ever issued of Saint-Saëns’s organ music: a newly recorded centenary tribute to the grand old man of 19th-century music, who rubbed shoulders with and aroused the admiration of colleagues from Berlioz to Ravel.

While himself no conventional kind of Christian believer, Saint-Saëns worked as a church organist for much of his prodigiously long life and career. While still a teenager he won the premier prix for organ at the Paris Conservatoire. In 1857, at the age of 22, he was appointed as titular organist to the church of the Madeleine in Paris, where he remained until 1877; it was there that Liszt heard him improvising and hailed him as the greatest organist in the world.

His output for the organ is no less subtly German-accented than much of his orchestral music, influenced by Schumann and Mendelssohn as well as disciplined by his comprehensive study of Bach and Beethoven as a child. While publically maintaining an attitude of scepticism towards Wagner, he nonetheless wrote with a chromatic intensity which finds a natural home in the incense-soaked world of pieces such as the Elévation et Communion and the E major Offertoire. Other reflective works include a trio of Rhapsodies on Breton themes, op.8, which invite comparison with similar folksong-based organ pieces by Vaughan Williams.

Saint-Saëns understood how to exploit the full spectrum of tonal colours available on the instruments designed by the greatest organ builder of his age, Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, and even the apparently abstract designs of his many Preludes and Fugues invite the kind of swirling mists and brilliant sunshine evoked by Michele Savino on this newly-recorded collection. The composer’s gifts as a colourist on the organ reach the summit of their expression in a collection of Seven Improvisations which, like much else here, deserves to be better known.

Born in Italy in 1978, now working principally in Germany, Michele Savino has recorded this collection on two German instruments: CD2 on the Forster and Andrews organ at the church of St John the Baptist, Forchheim, and the remainder on the Welte organ at the Church of Saint Boniface in the Westphalian town of Emmendingen. This release marks his debut on Brilliant Classics.