Once dubbed ‘the French Mendelssohn’, Camille Saint-Saëns was a prodigiously gifted composer of sophisticated and appealing music much of which has been unjustly neglected in recent times. His three highly inventive and technically demanding violin concertos, of which the Second is arguably the most memorable and the Third the best known, abound in unforgettable melodies and expressive subtleties. The young Parisian violinist Fanny Clamagirand, who won First Prize at the 2005 Fritz Kreisler Competition in Vienna and First Prize at the 2007 Monte Carlo Violin Masters Competition, the competition of competition winners, is an ideal interpreter of this gorgeous French Romantic music.