Camille Saint-Saëns

Camille-Marie Stamaty was a French pianist, piano teacher and composer predominantly of piano music and studies . Today largely forgotten, he was one of the preeminent piano teachers in 19th century Paris. His most famous pupils were Louis Moreau Gottschalk and Camille Saint-Saëns. Stamaty... was the star pupil of Friedrich Kalkbrenner and heir to Kalkbrenner's teaching method. He taught a crisp, fine, even filigree piano playing that concentrated on evenness of scales, independence of fingers and minimum movement of body and arms. Stamaty composed a great number of piano studies , various other shorter piano works , a piano concerto and some chamber music. None of his music is still in the repertoire today, although a good look at his once famous études might be very worthwhile. New recordings of his best output , possibly on period instruments, would be desirable. Camille-Marie Stamaty, born in Rome, was the son of a naturalized Greek father and a French mother.
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Hector Berlioz was a French Romantic composer, best known for his compositions Symphonie fantastique and Grande messe des morts . Berlioz made... significant contributions to the modern orchestra with his Treatise on Instrumentation. He specified huge orchestral forces for some of his works; as a conductor, he performed several concerts with more than 1,000 musicians. He also composed around 50 songs. His influence was critical for the further development of Romanticism, especially in composers like Richard Wagner, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Franz Liszt, Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler and many others. Hector Berlioz was born in France at La Côte-Saint-André in the département of Isère, near Grenoble. His father, a respected provincial physician and scholar, was responsible for much of the young Berlioz's education. His father, Louis-Joseph Berlioz, was an atheist, with a liberal outlook; his mother, Marie-Antoinette, was an orthodox Roman Catholic. He had five siblings in all, three of whom did not survive to adulthood. The other two, Nanci and Adèle, remained close to Berlioz throughout his life.
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