Mendelssohn, Saint-Saëns, and Beethoven

Meet renowned soloist Owen Young

A Boston area resident, Cellist Owen Young has enjoyed a long and distinguished career as an orchestra and solo cellist.

He has appeared with many orchestras and is a frequent collaborator in chamber music concerts and festivals. He has appeared in the Tanglewood, Aspen, Banff, Davos, Sunflower, Gatway, Brevard, and St. Barth's and many more music festivals. Young's performances have been broadcast on National Public Radio, WQED in Pittsburgh, WITF in Harrisburg, and WGBH in Boston. He performs frequently with singer/songwriter James Taylor.

He is on the faculty of The Berklee School of Music and is enthusiastically active in Project STEP (String Training and Education Program) which provides talented young musicians that identify with underrepresented groups, with classical music instruction envisioning a world in which the classical music profession reflects the racial and ethnic diversity of our communities.

Young holds both bachelor's and master's degrees from Yale University. He was a Tanglewood Music Center Fellow in 1986 and 1987. He was a Harvard-appointed resident tutor and director of concerts in Dunster House at Harvard University. He played with the Atlanta Symphony in 1988, was a member of the New Haven Symphony in 1986-87 and of the Pittsburgh Symphony from 1989 until he joined the BSO in 1991.

Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns

French composer Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns (1835 – 1921) was an organist, conductor and pianist of the Romantic era. His best-known works include Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso, his Second Piano Concerto, Danse macabre, his opera Samson and Delilah, his Third Violin Concerto, his Third ("Organ") Symphony, The Carnival of the Animals and his First Cello Concerto which we will hear in this concert.

A musical prodigy, Saint-Saëns made his concert debut at the age of ten. After studying at the Paris Conservatoire he followed a conventional career as a church organist, playing at several churches for some 20 years after which he became a successful freelance pianist and composer, in demand in Europe and the Americas.

Saint-Saëns was a scholar of musical history, and remained committed to the structures worked out by earlier French composers. However, as the 20th Century came in, Saint-Saëns became out of fashion with the Parisian musical scene. He was often reported to have walked out, scandalised by Igor Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring and expressed his firm view that Stravinsky was insane.

His Cello Concerto No. 1 in A minor, Op. 33

Still, no matter how out of fashion Saint-Saën's may have become in the early 20th century, today his compositions are among the most popular and his Cello Concerto No. 1 in A minor, Op. 33, which, he wrote in 1872 when he was 37 years old, is considered one of his greatest.

After hearing the concerto performed, January 19, 1873, at the Paris Conservatoire, Sir Donald Francis Tovey wrote "Here, for once, is a violoncello concerto in which the solo instrument displays every register without the slightest difficulty in penetrating the orchestra."

Many composers, including Shostakovich and Rachmaninoff, considered this concerto to be the greatest of all cello concertos. Yo-Yo Ma's recording of five "Great Cello Concertos" includes Saint-Saëns' Cello Concerto No. 1 in A minor, Op. 33

In this concerto Saint-Saëns broke with convention. Instead of using the normal three-movement concerto form, he wrote the piece in one continuous movement which contains three sections sharing interrelated ideas.

Here Saint-Saëns uses the cello as a declamatory instrument. This keeps the soloist in the foreground, the orchestra offering a backdrop. The music is tremendously demanding for soloists, especially in the fast third section which has made the concerto a favorite of the great virtuoso cellists.