Symphony No. 3 by Saint-Saëns is probably best understood as a ‘symphony with added organ’, because only two of its four movements feature the instrument.

As a young composer, Saint-Saëns popularity in France led to an invitation to Great Britain in 1871 to play for Queen Victoria and study Handel’s manuscripts in the library at Buckingham Palace. In 1886, the Philharmonic Society commissioned his Third Symphony, premiered in London at the St. James’s Hall on 19 May, conducted by the composer himself. He later dedicated the work to his dear friend and supporter from those early days in Paris, Franz Liszt, who’s died in the summer of 1886.

It’s a magnificent work, with the composer saying he was writing to his limits: ‘I gave everything to it I was able to give. What I have here accomplished I will never achieve again.’

It is indeed a remarkable symphony – one of the most technically advanced and sophisticated of the late 19th century, packed with innovations for the time, and without a doubt the pinnacle of Saint-Saens achievements. The composer seemed to know it would be his last attempt at the symphonic form and he wrote the work almost as a type of “history” of his own career: virtuoso piano passages, brilliant orchestral writing characteristic of the Romantic period, and the sound of a cathedral-sized pipe organ.