Music for Saxophone
and Orchestra
The saxophone was developed in Paris in the 1840s by Adolphe Sax, a
member of the instrument-manufacturing Sax family established in Brussels. It
was natural that the new instrument would have a particular appeal to French
composers and it found an early place in French military bands, gradually
making an appearance in French opera for special purposes of orchestral
colouring. In America the saxophone proved of use to Sousa in the l890s, before
becoming an essential element in jazz and in swing bands.
An astonishingly prolific composer, Darius Milhaud was born in 1892 in
Aix-en-Provence into a prosperous Jewish family. Trained at the Paris
Conservatoire as a pupil of Leroux, Gédalge, Dukas and Widor, he enjoyed close
friendship with a number of painters and writers. Among the latter Paul Claudel
assumed some importance in his life, particularly when Milhaud was able in 1916
to accompany him to Brazil, employed nominally as Claudel's secretary at the
French embassy. Milhaud's earliest music for the theatre was for plays by
Claudel. Now their association introduced a new influence, the music of Brazil.
Throughout his life Milhaud travelled widely, obliged, with the German
occupation of France, to take temporary refuge in the United States of America.
In 1947 he was able to return home, but maintained his teaching connection with
America in spite of the increasingly paralyzing effects of rheumatoid
arthritis, from which he suffered for many years.
Among Milhaud's most popular music is the suite known as Scaramouche,
drawn from incidental music written in 1937 for a production of a
children's play by Vildrac based on Molière's Le médicin volant, in
which the figure from the Italian comedy, renamed by Molière Sganarelle, appears
as a pretend Italian doctor, of transparent incompetence, to help his master's
love intrigues. The original Italian play involved Scaramouche himself in this
role. The new version of the play was staged at the Théâtre Scaramouche in
Paris in May 1937. The witty music by Milhaud opens with a lively movement that
makes some use of a tune better known to the English as 'Ten green bottles,
hanging on the wall'. The second movement has more romantic pretentious,
leading to a final excursion to South America.
Glazunov was a pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov, with whom he collaborated in
the completion of compositions left unfinished by Borodin. He won early favour
with Balakirev, self-appointed mentor of a group of composers devoted to the
cause of Russian musical nationalism but Balakirev's influence was soon
replaced by that of Belyayev. After the political disturbances of 1905 in St.
Petersburg, Glazunov was elected director of the Conservatory, a position he
retained even after 1928 when he settled in Paris. As a composer, Glazunov
combines national inspiration with the technical musical accomplishment of
professional Russian musicians of his generation. His particular skill in
orchestration is admirably shown in the Saxophone Concerto, a significant element
in the classical repertoire of the instrument, in which the possibilities of
the saxophone are deftly exploited. It was written two years before his death
but shows no evidence of declining facility.
It was with considerable reluctance that Debussy undertook a commission
to write a work for the saxophone. The American player of the instrument, Mrs.
Richard J. Hall, was nothing if not persistent. She commissioned the work in
1895, but it was not completed until 1908, in a version for alto saxophone and
piano. The scoring for orchestra sketched by Debussy was only completed in 1919
by Roger-Ducasse. Mrs. Hall had taken up the saxophone for her health and
commissioned various works from French composers to provide herself with a
repertoire. In 1904 she played in Paris the Choral varié that Vincent
d'Indy had written for her, and Debussy claimed it quite ridiculous to see a
lady in a pink frock playing such a clumsy instrument. In a letter the year
before to his friend, the writer Pierre Louÿs, he excuses himself for any delay
in writing by his preoccupation with the composition of a work he describes as
a Fantaisie, for which he had been paid over a year before, the fee long
since eaten up. 'For some days', he writes, '…I am the-man-who-is-working-on-a-fantasy-for-alto-saxophone-in-E-flat
- try and say that without breathing.' 'The Saxophone' he continues, 'is a reed
animal of whose habits I know little: does it favour the romantic sweetness of
the clarinet or the slightly coarse irony of the sarrusophone, a double bassoon…?'Debussy
finally allowed it to play melancholy phrases under the rolling of a military
drum and named the piece Rapsodie arabe, rewarding Mrs. Hall's patience
with a work that bears the unmistakable mark of Debussy at the height of his
evocative powers.
In the hands of the French composer Jacques Ibert, a master of woodwind
textures, various uses were found for the saxophone in music for the theatre
and the concert hall. His Concertino da camera was written in 1935, two
years before the composer's appointment as director of the Académie de France
in Rome, a position he retained until 1960. The Saxophone Chamber Concertino
demonstrates Ibert's fine command of instrumentation and a lightness of touch
that conceals a depth of feeling, heard particularly in the slow movement, its
poignant expressiveness magically dispelled in a final rapid jeu d'esprit.
Maurice Ravel's orchestration of the Russian composer Mussorgsky's piano
suite, Pictures at an Exhibition, provided the saxophone with one of its
most evocative solos in the modern orchestral repertoire. In this movement, the
saxophone offers an antique, melancholy serenade outside the walls of the old
castle. Sohre Rahbari concludes the disc with an improvisation for saxophone in
Japanese style, making use of techniques of playing long familiar in Japanese
music but with a certain novelty in Western terms.
Keith Anderson