Travels and memories

I associate saxes with jazz rather than classical, but I was taken by the Andromeda Sax Quartet that played at Wesley.  I was recording and I had recorded them before and the theme of the concert, Mass transit, seemed pretty pedestrian (well, not on foot, but you get the idea) but it was anything but.  So we heard a string of cities imaged by composers in their youthful ramblings, Cordoba, Sarajevo, Koln and Addis Ababa from Guillermo Lago and Lisboa, Casablanca, Alger and Retour from Pedro Iturralde, and a view of the worlds from Irish composer Emma O'Halloran after a move to Miami, picturing the city of night life and ocean.  These are not particularly known composers showing the adventurousness of the Quartet and the rarity of the sax quartet format, probably/perhaps both.  The format is Soprano, Alto, Tenor, Baritone saxes, so a neat choral-like structure and related somewhat to the much more common string quartet.  They added a piano for the second half of the show which included the concert's namesake, Mass transit.  This was originally written for string quartet and piano and arranged for this format: very successfully even if the piano was lost amongst some loud horns (excuse the jazz-ism).  This particularly interested me, given it was a memory of the composer's, Sam Wu's, memories of public transport in Shanghai, metro, gardens, train announcements and the rhythms of motion.  It was particularly interesting for me as we'd been in Shanghai just weeks before and travelled the 300kpm, 7min maglev trip to the airport which appears as mvt.3 Airport express.  So it was close to home but also loud and insistent and adventurous and wonderfully capable.  Chatting with the group afterwards, I heard of workshops and friendships with the masters of the classical sax world.  I guess this is a pretty small community and well known within its own world: something that strings or even woodwinds and the rest might not know.  Whatever, this was a fabulously interesting outing, loud, skilled, mature and responsive and open to all manner of new classical and related musics, from jazz-like grooves from bari and tenor through pretty 30's-like big bands to C20th classics.  Catch them if you can.

Andromeda Sax Quartet comprises Paige Gullifer (soprano), Ryan Piccione (alto), Henry Docker (tenor) and Sam Dong (baritone) and Catherine Li (piano) joined them for the second half of the performance.

Deserving youth

I record Wednesday lunchtime concerts at Wesley and I often hear upcoming pianists, experienced with great teachers and Eisteddfod and the likes and it's a pleasure.  This day was Shreyas Sunkaraneni who I had seen before but not as a solo concert performer.  He was seriously impressive, capable, memorised, authentic and emotive, playing Haydn, Chopin, Brahms and interestingly and more diversely, Debussy.  I drooled over the delicacy of the playing, the beautifully spelled out passages, some free floating times and insistent, forceful statements.  The Haydn was a Sonata in C minor, the Chopin an Etude in C# minor, the Brahms a Rhapsody in G minor, but the  most demanding and exquisite with modern colours and pensive restraint was Debussy, La soiree dans Grenade.  This arrived at a recent century, with what I interpreted as a dancing, dotted rhythm, Habanero to teacher Marie.  But all, varied as it was, was played with seriousness and commitment despite a few slipups.  So be it; this was serious and demanding music played from memory by a young player.  In fact the concert was entitled Delicacy and Passion.  How could I question that?  I was impressed and look forward to being so again.  Youth never ceases to impress me after having left it somewhat behind.

Shreyas Sunkaraneni (piano), student of Marie Cull, performed Haydn, Chopin, Brahms and Debussy at Wesley.