Composed for Victoria Benjamin and commissioned by the PFA of Newbuey Music Centre. This piece requires a soloist of the highest order and a string section that wish to delve into music requiring a little something out of the ordinary!

The mp3 recording is the first movement, premiere concert performance with Vicky playing!

Composed for Victoria Benjamin and commissioned by the PFA of Newbuey Music Centre. This piece requires a soloist of the highest order and a string section that wish to delve into music requiring a little something out of the ordinary!

The mp3 recording is the first movement, premiere concert performance with Vicky playing!

All Reviews

There are 2 reviews for this score

This looks like a lot of fun to play!
There's a lot of really nice writing here and as a saxophonist I'd have to say it'd be a really good workout, although I would have one or two criticisms about the composition. Firstly, I think it could do with a bit more consistency with respect to the subject material and the way it is organised. I wasn't able to recognise a particular form for the piece. It's definitely not a derivative of Sonata Form and I don't think the various movements are a set of variations either. There's a lot of differing and contrasting material and it seems to have been structured more like a medley of ideas that are musically unrelated, than a through-composed sonatina. Obviously when you're writing a work for this sort of instrumentation that lasts for ten minutes you want to go out of your way to make sure you have your audience's full attention for the whole piece, but you've got to keep consistency with the way your thematic material fits together and also your part-writing, so that people feel like it's all part of the same piece of music. This piece suggests that the composer has, for the sake of providing adequate contrast, strung together a number of themes and ideas that should really each be developed into a piece of music in its own right. Simply returning to the exposition of the original theme cannot compensate for the way the rest of the material is handled. Part of the problem lies in the transition between movements (or sections, whichever they're intended to be), in that the statement of each is not properly concluded, and instead is interrupted so that the next can begin. Each idea is abandoned, seemingly unfinished and no return is made to it (apart from the opening theme) and the narrative of the music, in effect, has a lot of loose-ends that ought to be tied up in the conclusion of the piece but this just doesn't happen. I also think that the harmony and voice-leading could do with a bit of a revision in a lot of places. This is I think the main-contributor to the vibes of inconsistency, in that harmonically the piece has more order and direction in some places than others. If there were something in maybe just a few elements of the music linking all the passages together it would take the piece a long way forwards. Texture is I think the piece's real strong point. The rhythms and playing techniques are really well co-ordinated across the string parts allowing the saxophone to do what it does best over the top. If the piece were as focused in areas such as harmony and form/structure we might have a great addition to the classical saxophone repertoire on our hands. I'd also like to point out that the comment in the programme notes that suggested that the piece calls for a saxophonist of the highest order is something of an exaggeration. Yes it's a difficult piece, but it's perfectly playable, and nothing that can't be achieved with the amount of practice that would be put in by anyone learning a concerto on any instrument. Anyone who could play the Glazounov, the Milhaud Scaramouche, the Ibert, the Debussy etc. would have no trouble performing this piece. It looks well within my own capability as a player and I know plenty of saxophonists who are of a far higher order than I am. The composer should of course interpret this comment as a compliment of his ability to write for the saxophone, as it's all too easy to get carried away and demand the impossible and then alienate any saxophonists you might find willing to take on the task of performing your work.

Ben Donnelly

Stunning!
What a stunning work from the pen of Kevin Riley. The combination of Saxophone and Strings is beautiful, and works very well indeed.

Keith Terrett