The Carnival of the Animals on 2 April at the home of Pauline Viardot with an audience including Franz Liszt, a friend of the composer, who had expressed a wish to hear the work. There were other private performances, typically for the French mid-Lent festival of , but Saint-Saëns was adamant that the work would not be published in his lifetime, seeing it as detracting from his "serious" composer image. He relented only for the famous cello solo "The Swan", which forms the penultimate movement of the work, and which was published in 1887 in an arrangement by the composer for cello and solo piano
The Orchestral Tubular Bells Town Hall in September 1974 by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. This was shown on a British television station, BBC Two, with Steve Hillage (of Gong) playing guitar. Oldfield later added his playing to the album by overdubbing his acoustic guitar at Worcester Cathedral. "The Orchestral Tubular Bells" was not the only Mike Oldfield album that was orchestrated at the time, David Bedford also wrote the score for Oldfield's second album, "Hergest Ridge". However, "The Orchestral Hergest Ridge" was never released to the public as an album. Excerpts from "The Orchestral Hergest Ridge" were also featured in the 1979 NASA film,