Philip Glass’ Concerto for Saxophone Quartet was commissioned by the Raschèr Saxophone Quartet and the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival and premiered in Stockholm on 1 September 1995. At the commissioners’ request Glass wrote one version with orchestra and one for the four saxophones alone; he considered the quartet version by far the more difficult, since the four players have to play every note themselves, including those otherwise taken by the orchestra. Each of the four movements places one instrument and its range of colours in the spotlight, and in the dense chamber version echoes of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos are unmistakable. Glass combines lyrical, contrapuntal and rhythmic writing with his minimalist patterns.
Frank Reinshagen, saxophonist and jazz composer from the Saarland, received the first WDR Jazz Preis in 2004; at the time of release he directed the Cologne Contemporary Jazz Orchestra and taught at the Cologne Musikhochschule. “The Invitation” (2002), composed especially for Tetraphonics, is based on the poem of the same name by the Canadian writer Oriah Mountain Dreamer, published in 1999 as part of a longer essay: a series of questions beginning with “I want to know …” that ask about pain, joy and failure. Reinshagen prefers to remain silent about the purpose of his piece and refers instead to further texts by the author.
Barbara Thompson, British jazz saxophonist, founded the group Paraphernalia in 1977 and took part in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Cats” and “Starlight Express”. When health problems forced her to withdraw temporarily from performing in 2001, she wrote three saxophone quartets for the Apollo Saxophone Quartet. The Saxophone Quartet No. 2 “From darkness into light”, premiered in London in 2002, allows no improvisational freedom: six movements named after colours lead from black to white, from darkness into light. In the second movement Thompson calls for “primeval screams”; the ending is a calm chorale for four soprano saxophones, meant to sound like female voices.
Zdenek Lukas dedicated his Rondo per 4 sassofoni to the saxophonist Sigurd Raschèr in 1970. With its melodic turns and harmonic colours, the solemn, reflective piece reveals the influence of folk music; Lukas directed a choir in Pilsen for twenty years. As an encore comes the Fugue No. 20 in A minor à 4 voci BWV 865 from Das Wohltemperierte Klavier Volume I. Tetraphonics was founded in 1994 and has premiered numerous works dedicated to it, among them pieces by Michael Denhoff and Stefan Thomas; in 2000 the whole quartet was invited to join the newly founded Raschèr Saxophone Orchestra. The players are Steffen Haß (soprano saxophone), Elmar Frey (alto saxophone), Volker Ax (tenor saxophone) and Richmond Mays (baritone saxophone); the recordings were made in autumn 2005 in the chamber music hall of Deutschlandfunk in Cologne.