Written as a nuptial tribute to pianist Caroline Montigny-Rémaury, Saint-Saëns' Wedding Cake (1885) for piano and strings is a slight but charming "caprice-valse" that's just a bit too big for the salon. The piano commences with a few sparkling cascades of notes that turn into a flighty waltz; the strings offer a more expansive, lilting tune, and the first third of this six-minute piece is simply an alternation of these two ideas. In the middle section, the piano misfires in starts and stops through several measures before it finally catches hold with brilliant passagework. The strings smooth things out; more explicitly waltz-like ideas return, and the piano now appropriates with gusto the strings' more developed theme from the first section. At the very end, the piano repeats its solo from the middle section; the piece ends not with fireworks, but with quietly tinkling utterances from the piano and a few almost offhanded pizzicati from the strings.

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