Metamorphosis is a recording of several concert works for saxophone quartet from Vancouver, Canada’s Saxophilia Saxophone Quartet (Julia Nolan, soprano; Kris Covlin, alto; David Branter, tenor; Colin MacDonald, baritone). Although the quartet has been together since 1996, this is their debut recording—an event long overdue, given the quality of the group’s instrumentalism and choice of repertoire.
The album’s title track, by Fred Stride, was originally composed in 2006 for clarinet quartet and was subsequently revised for saxophone quartet, the most recent revision coming in 2022 for this album. The four movement piece, with its agile melody lines placed over jazz-inflected chords, recalls the spirit of interwar post-impressionism. The three movement Divertimento, written for the Edmonton Saxophone Quartet in 1979 by the prolific Canadian composer Violet Archer (1913-2000), is a work of serpentine modal melodies and quartal harmonies for voices moving in parallel. The chromatic second movement features solo voices alternating with ensemble passages, while the concluding movement emphasizes contrapuntal interplay. Beatrice Ferreira’s five-part Nightmare Fragments (2018) is a crazy quilt of breathless pacing, jarring harmonies, and deliberately chaotic polyphony that translates the oneiric logic of strange dreams into sound. The languorous Homage to Robert Schumann (2022) by Vancouver composer Rodney Sharman runs a series of variations on a two-note motif taken from Schumann’s lied Auf einer Burg. Saxophilia’s own Branter contributes Four Stories, an eclectic 2022 work built around a four-note theme and incorporating pulsing melody loops, quartal harmonies, a rock n’ roll blues progression, and an allusion to swing jazz in a minor key. In giving the quartet an opportunity to display its versatility, it provides the album with a fitting finale and summation.
A built-in hazard of the saxophone quartet is its timbral limitation. But that isn’t at all the case with this recording, which captures a sound closer to a concert wind ensemble than a standard saxophone quartet. The warm, refined tones of all four players are particularly noteworthy.
Daniel Barbiero
Avant Music News 