Marcus Weiss

SAX brings together four concertante works for saxophone written in recent decades, all premiered by Marcus Weiss and three of them dedicated to him. More than 180 years after its invention, the saxophone has triumphed in many styles but never quite settled in the symphony orchestra, and relatively few solo works have been written for it. This album shows what has changed.

Weiss, one of the leading classical saxophonists and a founder member of Trio Accanto, chose the pieces to cover a wide range of possibilities and the full family of instruments, from baritone to soprano. He is joined by the WDR Sinfonieorchester under Elena Schwarz and Emilio Pomàrico, by accordionist Teodoro Anzellotti, and by the wind ensemble Windkraft Tirol under Kasper de Roo. The album is a production of Westdeutscher Rundfunk Köln, licensed by WDR mediagroup.

The centrepiece is the Konzert for baritone saxophone and orchestra by Georg Friedrich Haas, written in 2008 on a WDR commission and played here with Pomàrico. When Adolphe Sax applied for his patents in Paris in 1846 he submitted drawings of the baritone. Haas makes full use of its physical power, setting multiphonics against the orchestra but also giving it a singing parlando. Péter Eötvös's Focus, the most recent and most virtuosic piece of the set, is a concerto in four movements, conducted by Schwarz, that uses both tenor and alto saxophone. Vykintas Baltakas chose the soprano for Saxordionphonics, a crystalline work for soprano saxophone, accordion and chamber orchestra. Johannes Maria Staud's Violent Incidents (Hommage à Bruce Nauman) sets the saxophone against wind instruments and percussion.

Each composer represents a different direction within new music, and the album works as a survey of how the instrument has been rethought as a concerto voice. In Weiss's words, the pieces show that saxophone soloists "always play the full range of instruments, from the lowest to the highest", with each instrument revealing its particular qualities. The Haas concerto has had a life beyond this recording: Weiss also gave its UK premiere with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra in Glasgow in 2014.

CD, Wergo WER 7389 2, released in 2023, total time 71'12".