News and Observer (Raleigh, NC)

February 1, 1993

Quartet Reveals the Joy of Sax

by Nancy R. Ping-Robbins

The recent first-prize winners of the international Concert Artists Guild Competition appeared on the campus of Barton College in Howard Chapel Thursday night for a dazzling display of top-flight saxophone quartet music making.  The New Century Saxophone Quartet, made up of graduates of the North Carolina School of the Arts and other state residents, is on its way to a career of international tours, recording contracts and concerts across the United States.

From the very first phrases, it was clear that these are superb artists and performers: Michael Stephenson on soprano; James Boatman, alto; Stephen Pollock, tenor; and Brad Hubbard, baritone.  Every selection was performed in appropriate style: cool, smooth contrapuntal lines of great delicacy in a Sweelinck Fantasia; warm, finely shaded dynamic nuances in the Caryl Florio (1857) Quartette; fierce, sharp articulation and fortitude of sound in Genzmer’s Germanic second quartet; charming, lightly rhythmic, almost frothy Gallic humor in Jean Françaix’s ‘Petit quatuor pour saxophones’; and rocking American jazz touches and sheer comedy on sound in a marvelous ‘Drastic Measures’ by Russell Peck of Greensboro.

The ensemble has worked together since 1989; the experience shows.  The beauty of tone quality, delicacy of dynamic nuances and unbelievable facility in rhythmic complexities are qualities one would not ordinarily expect from an instrument that can sound like a honking beast in less experienced hands.  To put four of them together and have tiny silken threads of sound issue forth is astounding.  But the fun part is that in the next nanosecond, huge walls of sound may very well issue forth.

The first half of the program was near perfect.  Even solo lines in the opening of the Sweelinck were carefully controlled, beautifully colored.  The alto sax entry had a slight graininess in a couple of phrases that told us this was a saxophone quartet, not strings, but otherwise the entire first half was a Juilliard String Quartet-level performance, with immaculate ensemble and solo musicianship.  One of the loveliest parts of the second half came in the Cantilene movement of the Françaix, when the three lower instruments sang a lament: smooth, exquisite solo alto over languidly pulsating tenor and baritone.  Most of the time Stephenson’s sweet soprano sang the part of first violin, coordinating and leading the ensemble top melody line.  These musicians’ style depends on what the innovative composer asks them to do, and they have found some very clever, highly skilled artists to write their music.  Sherwood Shaffer of the North Carolina School of the Arts, the first musician to win the O. Max Gardner Award (1992), has written a ‘Sinfonia’ of which they played the very beautiful, but unusual ‘Lyric’ for this concert.

Saxophone quartet literature originated with the Florio Quartette, but with this emerging group (and others in the concert mainstream) we are bound to hear more in years to come.  The instrument that previously has been consigned primarily to jazz in this country is one of the most versatile of all, capable of extreme dynamics on either end, with smooth lovely tone equal to the sweetest violin song, yet equally expressive in bizarre, comic or even tragic passages.