Press Release
Classical review: Stellar weekend for stellar sax soloist
Published May 8, 2005
Star Tribune
By Michael Anthony
Tenor saxophonist Joe Lovano, a luminary of the jazz world, has a busy weekend in the Twin Cities, playing with both the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and tonight with the Chamber Music Society of Minnesota.
With the Chamber Orchestra on Friday night at the Ordway Center, Lovano played the American premiere of "A Man Descending," a work for tenor saxophone and orchestra by the English composer Mark-Anthony Turnage that this orchestra and four other ensembles commissioned. (The Scottish Chamber Orchestra gave the world premiere in 2003.) Turnage's title alludes to Vaughan Williams' well-known piece for violin and orchestra, "A Lark Ascending," and, in fact, Turnage considers his piece a tribute to the older work. In a nice touch, both were played in Friday's concert.
They differ, of course. Vaughan Williams' "Lark" of 1914 embodies the English sense of nature in tone as much as Wordsworth embodied it in verse. Its pastoral tranquility contrasts with the more earthy sound of the tenor sax, a sound so closely associated with jazz. In another contrast, where Vaughan Williams' orchestra part is serene, Turn age's is edgy and nervous. Turnage wrote the piece with Lovano in mind, and some of it allows for improvisation from the soloist, and Lovano made much of that opportunity, displaying at all times his big rich tone and abundant store of musical ideas.
In another nice touch, they played the work twice, once before and once after intermission -- a practice that ought to be habitual with new works -- and it was interesting to hear how much looser Lovano's playing was the second time around.
As is the case, however, with many works of this type, the solo line is far more interesting than the orchestra part, which takes a more or less accompanying role and seems to be written in black and white -- or mostly gray -- whereas Lovano spoke in Technicolor.
Ruggero Allifranchini, the orchestra's associate concertmaster, played the solo part in the Vaughan Williams piece, giving this music just what it needs: a sweet tone, an air of hushed simplicity and a restrained vibrato.
The evening's conductor, Miguel Harth-Bodoya, music director of the Fort Worth, Texas, Symphony, kept both the Turnage and the Williams under careful but expressive control, and he wrapped up the evening with a fierce but sensual account of Falla's ballet score "El Amor Brujo," which Hugh Wolff and this orchestra recorded so successfully in the 1990s. Mezzo Mary Phillips made the songs vivid, giving them the right Gypsy harshness, even though some of those treacherous low notes didn't come easy. Kathryn Greenbank made the oboe solos sing attractively, and Harth-Bedoya sustained admirable rhythmic tension in the famous "Ritual Fire Dance."
Michael Anthony is at manthony@startribune.com.