January 30, 2019

  • New Music for Flute and Saxophone

     

    Crosswind
    Tower Duo:
    Erin Helgeson Torres, flute.
    Michael Rene Torres, saxophone
    Maria Staeblein, piano.
    Ravello Records 8003
    Total Time:  72:27
    Recording:   ****/****
    Performance: ****/****

    The Ohio-based Tower Duo explores music by emerging composers in this new release featuring eight works for the unique combination of flute and saxophone.  Many of the pieces here were commissioned by the duo over the last decade.

    The album takes its name from the opening 2013 work by Chin Ting Chan.  The piece adapts qualities of Asian music into this contemporary modern language.  Bent pitches and slides lend this effect with additional percussive sounds (coming from fast pressing of padded keys on the saxophone, especially) further give the piece this quality in its opening bars.  More fascinating is the way the two are combined sonically in such a way that they almost become one instrument moving towards a variety of swirls that evaporate in the final bars.  In this respect, it is like we are invited into a dance from an ancient story.  This is one of three single-movement works on the album.  Places Never Painted (2012) by Philip Sink follows a poetic text that explores the shaping of nature into artistic expression.  There is a seeming melancholy to the shape of the piece as it begins.  It explores some of the higher registral capabilities of the instruments early requiring deft control by the duo.  The two become entwined as the piece unfolds with a restrained sense of beauty.

    Later, another work exploring natural beauty appears in Dylan Arthur Baker’s Precipital Pairing (2014).  The opening movement starts slowly evolving from a single pitch and rhythmic pattern and moving from close dissonances to more parallel lines in alternation with one another.  The rhythms are transferred between the two instruments here in restricted pitch material.  The becomes a bit more diffuse in the concluding movement, “Mist”.  A more somber work by Marilyn Shrude follows.  Her Notturno (2014) was written in memory of the great Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu for violin, saxophone, and piano in 1996.  This is a reimagined version completed in 2007.  The darker colors of the piano appear like impressionistic undercurrents to the melancholy shape of the lines for the two soloists.  Here the two solo lines twist about often coming together in unison’s before moving out along different threads.  The piano adds some spatial harmonic ideas.  A fluttering technique provides an eerie quality before a more rapid and intense section provides expression for grief.  It is a very compelling work.

    Saxophonist Michael Rene Torres’ own Four Short Episodes (2011) comes from early in the formation of what would grow into the Tower Duo.  Each of the movements explores emotional and dramatic possibilities of these instruments through dialogue-like passages.  The ideas here are a bit more complex with a variety of interesting techniques added to the mix reaching into close intervallic ideas, bent pitches, and slides and spurts of technical requirements.  Scott Brickman’s Epic Suite (2012) uses a serial technique based on an octatonic scale in this five-movement work.  The opening movement though features some nice lyrical writing that is quite accessible given this underlying structural consideration.  Interesting rhythmic syncopated ideas add some nice energy as well.  In the slow movements, one can get a slightly clearer sense of the line being manipulated.

    At the center of the release is the more substantial work by Thomas Wells.  Tower Music (2017) was composed for the duo and thus is designed to exhibit their technique and virtuosic capabilities as well as interpretive phrasing and shaping of music.  The lengthier opening movement focuses on mood and development of material with intriguing close blending of the two lines.  The second movement focuses on lyrical writing (“Lamentazione”).  The final movement is a “Perpetuum Mobile” that closes off with references to the central movement after its virtuosic displays.  The final Three Pieces (2013) was written for the duo by Charlie Wilmoth.  Across these brief movements Wilmoth focuses on a specific rhythmic idea with unisons taking form only to be led astray into some new area.  The musical image is intended to align with the way the two musicians perform on stage with an intent focus on one idea being potentially distracted by another.

    The combination of flute and saxophone is a rather unique one.  These duos all tend to hit upon how the two sounds can meld into single pitch ideas and then move out from there to explore technique and unique possibilities on each instrument.  While the compositional challenge may have created a singular approach often by these composers, the resulting works are all still quite different making for a fascinating collection of contemporary pieces.  The performances here are equally accomplished and make for a rather engaging album of new music.