Saxophone

The GAIA Music Festival takes place annually in Oberhofen in Switzerland. The brainchild of violinist Gwendolyn Masin, the Festival is named after the Greek goddess of the Earth, and in just a few years has grown into a thriving and captivating series.

The GAIA Music Festival takes place annually in Oberhofen in Switzerland. The brainchild of violinist Gwendolyn Masin, the Festival is named after the Greek goddess of the Earth, and in just a few years has grown into a thriving and captivating series of events. Concerts from the Festival have been recorded in collaboration with Orchid Classics, capturing the energy and spontaneity of these special live performances.

‘A Minimal Sax’ takes a journey through the last 30 years of minimalist music, one of the most influential artistic movements of the last century. An accomplished young Italian ensemble takes us from the purism of New York Counterpoint by Steve Reich through the soulful strains of the Saxophone Quartet by Philip Glass, to the funky rhythms of Michael Torke’s July and the catchy off-beats of Michael Nyman’s Second String Quartet, in a version for saxophones which here receives its world premiere recording.

We announce the SIGNUM saxophone quartet release “Echoes”, a new digital album on Deutsche Grammophon.

Everything you need to get started on your saxophone journey in a compact crash course with many examples and guidance.

On BAROQUE, Californian saxophonist Christopher Greco delivers an inspired and effective blend of Baroque music with the rich voice of the soprano saxophone. The result is a refreshing and compelling interpretation that bridges two separate centuries with elegance and virtuosity.

Presenting this project, the Milano Saxophone Quartet leads the public through a real Metamorphosis. The audience realizes the quartet’s sound-transformation, which shows, through the performance and the different styles, one of its main idiomatic characteristics i.e. the flexibility.

Following its previous album Evoke, with the pianist Timothy End, the Ferio Saxophone Quartet returns with this exciting and innovative programme of works for saxophone quartet and voices. Founded and directed by Freddie Crowley, the Corvus Consort is a vocal ensemble based in the UK, which draws its members from a pool of young singers in the early stages of their professional careers. The project was inspired by the Quartet’s 2018 recording, Revive, an album of baroque transcriptions. Freddie Crowley writes: ‘Heinrich Schütz in the preface to his Geistliche Chor-Music, of 1648 (from which four of the items on this album are drawn) wrote: “You can perform some of these pieces […] with an organ or instruments on the choral parts along with a full choir.” The instruments he had in mind were not saxophones, of course, which would not be invented for another 200 years, but I suspect that he might have found them an excellent choice! Schütz intended his collection to be a demonstration of good composition without basso continuo, focussing on counterpoint as the foundation of compositional technique. It is these contrapuntal properties that make his and other baroque and Renaissance music so infinitely adaptable into new forms – transitioning effortlessly onto the saxophone, for example – and the same properties that underpin the four contemporary works on our album, all inspired in their own different ways by music of the Renaissance.’