Classical Saxophone? Benson Lee Brings It to St.Paul's February 25 with Pianist John Solari

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last Saturday afternoon, February 25 at 5 p.m., I went to a quite intriguing concert at St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral on Fufth and Nutmeg, featuring the so-called “Duo Azure” of saxophonist Benson Lee and pianist John Solari. The concert was hosted by Nicholas Halbert, the young organist from San Diego who’s studying at Arizona State University and has brought some members of the classical music department to perform at St. Paul’s, including Lee and Solari. Both at his Friday afternoon organ recital and before this concert, Halbert told the audience that probably none of you have ever been to a live concert of classical saxophone. I have; I remember years ago at the old San Diego Public Library on 8th and “E” seeing a baritone saxophonist play two of Johnan Sebastian Bach’s suits for unaccompanied cello, and since the baritone sax sounds in the same register as the cello he was able to play the pieces directly from the printed scores without any transposition or transcription. I mentioned that to Halbert before the concert, and he told me that Lee specializes in baritone sax but chose not to play it for this concert because it would have been too difficult to bring it in his car. Instead he played soprano If you’re used to hearing the saxophone in a jazz context, as I am, jazz saxophonists generally play with much “harder,” more metallic tones than classical ones. (Paul Desmond, one of the great jazz saxophonists, was an exception; his soft, subtle tone came closer to the sound of a classical saxophonist than most of his jazz brethren.)

The program mostly featured pieces written for instruments other than the saxophone, since the saxophone didn’t exist until the 1940’s, when Adolphe Sax, a musician and instrument maker born in Belgium in 1814 but, like most musically adept Belgians, he relocated to France. He moved from Brussels to Paris in 1942, though there seems to be some conjecture as to where he invented toe saxophone; I’d always thought he was living in Paris when he patented the saxophone in 1842, but according to Benson Lee he designed the instrument while he was still in Belgium and there’s a small town in Belgium that hails itself as the birthplace of the saxophone and hosts an annual competition for saxophonists. It’s also known that Sax played clarinet and flute, and his initial purpose in inventing the saxophone was to build a new sort of clarinet that would be able to play the missing notes between the two registers of a standard clarinet. Last night’s concert began with three “Fantaisiestücke” (“fantasy pieces”) by Robert Schumann, originally for clarinet and piano, which Schumann dashed off in a couple of days to meet a demand from a music publisher. Lee played them on alto sax and then shifted to soprano sax for the next piece, ”Black Anemones” by Joseph Schwantner, a contemporary composer (born 1943) best known for his piece New Morning for the World, a work for narrator and orchestra basically along the lines of Aaron Copland’s A Lincoln Portrait but paying tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr.

After that Lee played an unaccompanied solo for soprano sax, a piece called “Phoenix Rising” by another contemporary composer, Stacy Garrop (born 1969), which attempted to depict the life cycle of a phoenix, a legendary bird that regularly dies and comes to life. This piece gave Lee a chance to employ so-called “extended techniques” for his instrument, including blowing through it without activating the reed to create pitch, and clicking its keys. I thought the piece would make an excellent soundtrack for a hand-drawn animated cartoon featuring a phoenix dying and then coming to life. Ironically, the most moving piece of music played at the concert did nto feature Benson Lee; it was a work by Sergei Rachmaninoff, the first of a suite of piano works called “Moments Musicaux” (“Musical Moments’) which he wrote in his early years in Russia while awaiting the premiere of his First Symphony. As things turned out, the premiere was such a disaster that Rachmaninoff destroyed the score and fell into a deep depression that left him unable to compose for four years until a Russian therapist naked Nikolai Dahl worked with him at a time when psychotherapy was still in its infancy. Solari’s performance of the first of Rachmaininoff’s “Moments Musicaux” was deeply moving and heartfelt, and he had no trouble meeting Rachmaninoff’s technical demands (and sice Rachmaninoff was himself a virtuoso pianist, the technical challenges of his music have bedeviled generations of pianists since).

The next piece on the program reunited Lee and Solari and returned Lee to alto sax; it was a “Romance,” originally written for violin and piano, by the American composer Amy Beach (1867-1944). Under the prevailing sexism of her time her compositions were published as by “Mrs. H. H. A. Beach,” and my understanding is it took a good deal of musical detective work by modern biographers and historians even to learn what her actual first name had been. Beach wrote it for concert tours she undertook with another pioneering woman musician, violinist Maud Powell. It was a quite lovely, charming piece, but I think I would prefer to hear it on the violin. The closing piece on the program was a two-movement “Rhapsody” by André Weignein (1942-2015) written as a test piece for the annual Belgian saxophone festival in 2010. It began with a heavy-duty ontroduction for piano that sounded like Solari was about to start a Russian concerto for piano and orchestra before Lee, once again playing soprano sax, came in with a quite different and more lyrical line. The piece was written for a sax competition and ws therefore more openly virtuosic than anything else on the program – before it started Lee joked that it was the one piece in which he would play more notes than Solari did – and it was certainly fun in the sense that a fireworks display is fun. After that, Le and Solari played a lovely encore,a piece called “Gabriel’s Oboe” by Italian film composer Ennio Morricone (1928-2020) for the movie The Mission, which sounded vaguely like the American folk song “Shenandoah.” The concert was overall a quite good one and made an excellent case for the saxophone as a classical instrument, and as Nicholas Halbert promised in his introduction, it whetted my appetite for more classical sax recitals.