Camille Saint Saëns: Piano concerto No. 1 in D Major, Op. 17, Gabriel Tacchino

Camille Saint-Saëns: Piano concerto No. 1 in D Major, Op. 17, Gabriel Tacchino (piano), Orchestra of Radio Luxembourg, Louis de Froment (conductor) Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns (9 October 1835 – 16 December 1921) was a French composer, organist, conductor and pianist of the Romantic era. It is a little known fact that Saint-Saens was a child prodigy, a talent that rivaled that of Mozart. He started to play the piano aged two and a half, wrote his first piece aged three, and gave his first concert (which included the Beethoven third piano concerto) at age ten. In 1848, at the age of thirteen, Saint-Saëns was admitted to the Paris Conservatoire. In 1851 Saint-Saëns won the Conservatoire’s top prize for organists, and in the same year he began formal composition studies. After studying at the Conservatoire Saint-Saëns followed a conventional career as a church organist, first at Saint-Merri, Paris and, from 1858, La Madeleine, the official church of the