By Jack Marley
Stapleford Granary,
Cambridgeshire
This Friday the Apollo Saxophone Quartet appeared for a chamber concert at Stapleford Granary, an arts centre in a converted Victorian granary in the village of Stapleford, Cambridgeshire. The programme was organised in two halves. The first featured four of the quartet’s new commissions for the season. The second, receiving top billing in the concert’s publicity, comprised four scores from vintage cartoons, in new transcriptions and arrangements of by members of the quartet. These were performed in sync with projected screenings of the cartoons. Two short pieces then rounded off the evening.
The first of the commissions was Claire Cope’s Trapped. The work’s outer sections were built around a texture of driving baritone ostinato, jabbing harmonic inner parts, and lyrical soprano lines moving over the top (and variations there on). Cope is certainly not the first composer to utilise such an arrangement, so idiomatic to a quartet of saxophones as it is, and her take did not have much new to say about it. The piece was memorable mostly for moments when its jazzily tonal harmonic language collapsed into chords of chromatic dissonance, the interfering frequencies shimmering around the Granary’s perfect chamber acoustic. Jenni Watson’s Radius II took a different tact, its beautiful homophonic swells capturing a tender majesty that seemed a fitting tribute to Don Ashton, a saxophone repairer and musician well known to the quartet members.
However, these two works seemed only warm up acts to Dani Howard’s Neverland. The swirling sound world created in the first bars of music, the ebb and flow of stasis and movement, patterns and variation, suggested a master hand at work. The title perfectly puts the audience in mind of the imagery the music evokes: the excited wonderment of exploration in some mystical and unknown realm. The piece was a total pleasure from start to finish, capturing the kaleidoscopic colours of the composer’s orchestral work with only four players.
Grace-Evangeline Mason’s In the Fragrant Air, which closed out the concert’s first half, was equally captivating. In his introduction, tenor player Andy Scott remarked that whilst saxophone quartet repertoire is often loud and bombastic, occasional works, such as this, put the ensemble in service of a gentler and more tender world that, in his words, ‘take [the quartet’s] breath away.’ Listening to the piece, I could only agree. It opens with delicately intertwining falling figures in the soprano and alto, longer lines slowly emerging. After a period of harmonic exploration the music sank, with a sigh, back into this opening texture, as if into an old armchair after a long day. The deftness of this transition created a moment of stark beauty.
Throughout all these works the quartet played with an assurance and crisp ensemble that one would expect from a group celebrating their fortieth year, and yet nonetheless impresses. The effortless dynamic range was particularly striking, so seamless in tone quality from the gentlest pianissimo to full-bodied forte that one almost didn’t realise such a shift had taken place. The bell-like clarity of Rob Buckland’s soprano tone rang gloriously throughout the programme, particularly in Cope’s opening composition.
Then the quartet donned earpieces for click tracks, the lights dimmed and the projector (proverbially) began to whir for the vintage cartoon project. The quartet had set themselves a formidable challenge in accompanying Warner Bros’ 1931 cartoon The Fox Hunt. Many hours were spent transforming the original orchestral scores into precise saxophone quartet arrangements, which had to be performed in perfect synchronization with the moving images—especially the tightly timed stings in the later two cartoons, scored by Carl Stalling. Not content with this feat alone, the quartet also took on live sound effects, delighting the audience with Buckland’s amusing bird whistles and Scott’s Monty Python-esque coconut shell horse clops. The entire project relied on a rare and creative use of AI: an AI program isolated the musical score from dialogue and some sound effects, allowing the quartet to perform the music live while the other sounds were amplified in the venue. This setup was especially effective when the quartet harmonized with pitched elements retained in the original audio, such as the chiming village bell at the start of The Fox Hunt.
The difficulty of the task the quartet faced, and its novelty as a technological-musical project, clearly animated the players . The precision required injected into the concert a frisson of endeavour and risk: ‘see you on the other side,’ Buckland tellingly signed off his address. From an outside perspective they nailed it, and the interplay of sound and image was so neatly achieved that one began to forget that the music was even being performed live.
It is in this last point that my issue with the project lies. For all its originality and musical prowess, I was left unconvinced of the concept’s potential. With the lights down and projector on, the players were demoted from chamber performers to pit band. This is no slight on pit musicians – the skill of the playing was undeniable– but rather a question of emphasis. The audience’s attention inevitably shifted to the projected animations themselves, which thus became the main entertainment on offer. It put me in mind of the trend in the last decade or so for film screenings with live orchestral accompaniment. These events are just that – film screenings with the novelty element of live music. Having gone to see a performance of a highly esteemed chamber ensemble, that is what I hoped to witness, rather than an enhanced screening of four short and rather vacuous vintage cartoons (selected simply for an absence of the offensive stereotyping pervasive in such animations, as Buckland revealed).
In the first half of the concert, one heard the distinct artistic voices of four wonderful composers, sounded out by four equally skilled and individual saxophonists. In the second half such voices fell silent. In a pre-concert talk, the CEO and co-artistic director of Stapleford Granary, Kate Romano, lamented Stalling’s low profile despite his prolific compositional output and the cultural influence of his music. However, such anonymity is perhaps unsurprising given the nature of the task. Whilst encouraging technical and musical innovation, scoring cartoons necessarily curtails any more profound aesthetic aspiration and obscures the composer behind the on-screen figures that their music serves (and whom, taking Mickey Mouse as one example, have the very cultural visibility that Stalling lacks). Rather than lifting Stalling and his cartoon-composer colleagues out of this state of anonymity with the project, the quartet seemed to rather join them in it for half an hour, which was a shame. It was undeniably fun and entertaining, but in contrast to the emotionally searching, tonally varied, and aesthetically rich works presented in the first half, the overall effect was unsatisfying.
The two short contemporary compositions closing the programme were well selected, a nice final ornament for evening. Fieldhouse’s Harbour Light was a simple and charming work inspired by an early morning sunrise over Whitby Harbour; Adam Caird’s Move with the Time an energetic, light-hearted work that provided a nice sense of finality without ostentation.