This issue in our French Song Edition is a single disc devoted to the songs of Camille Saint-Saëns, the composer of Carnival of the Animals, Danse Macabre and Samson and Dalila. During his long life (he lived to the age of eighty-six) he wrote a surprisingly large number of songs, few of which are well known. Here are twenty-seven of them. Saint-Saëns drew his texts from a wide variety of sources, old and new, including the greatest French writers of his time – Victor Hugo particularly. But, as Graham Johnson wittily says in his notes to the disc, 'they were all grist to Camille'.