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Piers Lane, pictured at left, first came to my attention when a friend of mine asked if I'd ever heard of him. She'd just got back from England where she said they acclaimed him the greatest living pianist. Well I just had to check this claim out so I got hold of his recording of the obscure and ferociously difficult Saint-Saëns études.

Frankly the only reason this doesn't get my highest rating is due to the music not the playing. The piano is a Steinway and the playing is, well bluntly speaking it just couldn't have been done any better. This is really IT. If you can play this well you too deserve to be acclaimed the greatest living pianist.

Saint-Saëns, 1835-1921, pictured at right, is for many a very difficult composer to appreciate. A lot of his work sounds like someone else's. It's easy to see the point made by his friend Hector Berlioz that "all he lacked was inexperience" for Saint-Saens was one of those characteristically French types, the academic's academic, a sort of Renaissance man who was apparently just too good at what he did to be really good at it. He was a real genius, both extremely gifted, in areas other than music as well as in music, and fabulously intelligent besides, a little man who despite apparent physical weaknesses, outlived just about everyone and got to see a lot of the world including California by the time he died.

It is in part this academic perspective which helps one gain a greater appreciation for Saint-Saëns' accomplishments. These études include fugues. They look back and forward in time. They constitute a veritable encyclopedia of pianism, a technical monument, a thorough course of study for the aspiring piano virtuoso. Listening to Piers Lane knock them off flawlessly one after another, you are probably getting as close to actually experiencing just how Charles Camille Saint-Saëns, who performed as a concert pianist for 75 YEARS! actually played them, and I'm sure he did actually play them.

But these études remain emotionally cool music, cooler than most Bach, they really are STUDIES, rather than something that has more to say of a personal nature as do Chopin's. I decided that to really get into them I'd have to put them on continuous play for a while and just absorb them while I went about the rest of my work. They put me in a particular neat frame of mind. I wouldn't even say they are Romantic. They contain references to music from the Baroque period as well as to music that was written by later, also French, impressionists. Of particular interest to me were the modulations Saint-Saëns used. In some instances he achieves some fairly stunning effects, far more subtle than Liszt might have done. But anything dramatic is either naturalized or scaled down to French proportions. System matters here. Piers Lane's flawless pianism contributes to this, in fact it couldn't be brought to crystalline perfection without it. I will certainly be looking forward to hearing more from Piers Lane, who may indeed just may be the world's greatest living pianist.