Saxophilia Saxophone Quartet: Metamorphosis
Redshift Records

Saxophilia Saxophone Quartet clearly takes its time. Its second album Metamorphosis arrives five years after the group's self-titled debut album, which itself materialized no less than twenty-two years after the quartet's 1996 formation. Not that the Vancouver-based outfit hasn't been active: Saxophilia has made regular festival appearances—three times at the Sonic Boom Festival and once at the Vancouver New Music Festival—and were the featured saxophone section in the Vancouver Opera's production of Nixon in China. The group's commissioned and premiered works by figures such as Graham Fitkin, Erki-Sven Tüür, and Michael Torke, and, no surprise, all four group members—Julia Nolan (soprano), Kris Covlin (alto), David Branter (tenor), and Colin MacDonald (baritone)—also contribute to Vancouver's contemporary music scene, be it as soloists or as members of other ensembles.

Saxophilia plays with a finesse that's clearly benefited from the many activities with which its members have been involved. The four generate a warm, mellifluous sound that's seamless, refined, and agile, and while the compositions performed on Metamorphosis allow individual players to shine, the primary focus is on group expression, which is both tight and flexible. A distinguishing feature of Saxophilia's sound has to do with clarity, with each voice distinct and equally important to the whole. While musicality is at a high pitch throughout, technical facility is never paraded for its own sake, the quartet instead intent on presenting the five Canadian composers' pieces to the best of their ability.

The album has strong roots in Vancouver, not just for having been recorded at the city's Monarch Studios but also for featuring works by three city-based composers, Fred Stride, Rodney Sharman, and Saxophilia member Branter; the two other pieces are by Montreal-born Violet Archer and Canadian-American Beatrice Ferreirai, the latter currently ensconced in London, England. All are living composers but for Archer, who passed away in Ottawa in 2000.

Stride, a bandleader, arranger, trumpeter, and educator as well as composer, has worked with Saxophilia members before—his Concerto for Alto Saxophone and Orchestra was written for Nolan, for example—and continues the association with the album's four-part title work. Echoes of jazz are audible in the rhythmic propulsion of its framing movements, but the work most impresses for its striking contrapuntal flow and the animated back-and-forth between the instruments. That the quartet executes Stride's oft-intricate material with such seeming ease testifies to the members' dexterity. Whereas a romantic turn's taken for “Tango del Currie,” the group flirts with mystery in the ponderous meditation “Mystics.”

A Yale University graduate and student of Paul Hindemith and Bela Bartók, Archer (1913-2000) wrote Divertimento in 1979, its three parts marked by elegant counterpoint, playful rhythmic gestures, and harmonic adventurousness. Solo passages are more prominently featured here (see the central “Meditation”) than in Stride's setting, though Archer's achieves a similar lushness thanks to Saxophilia's beautiful playing. A graduate of McGill University and the Guildhall School of Music, Ferreirai's represented by the wide-ranging and arrestingly titled Nightmare Fragments. Drawing on imagery from her own dream journal, the work's five parts range from the restless probing of “three Witches on my bedsheets” and the surreal mix of vocal accents and honking saxes that is “I lay one million purple Eggs” to the drone exploration “on the pier: split Rosehip/Cyst” and dizzying pyrotechnics of “the Taxidermist's hallway.”

Like Archer, Sharman had illustrious teachers, in his case Brian Ferneyhough, Morton Feldman, David Felder, Frederic Rzewski, Louis Andriessen, and Lukas Foss. Those living in the Toronto area will also recognize him as the composer of the chamber opera Elsewhereless, which was staged in Toronto, Vancouver, and Ottawa. An extended meditation on Robert Schumann's “Auf einer Burg,” Sharman's Homage to Robert Schumann opts for a lyrical expression that's hushed, dignified, and lustrous. Metamorphosis concludes with Branter's Four Stories, which cleverly folds elements of the other composers' works into a ten-minute overview. From Stride there's contrapuntal intricacy, from Archer harmonic daring, from Ferreira playfulness, and from Sharman microtonal whisperings and overtones.

October 2023