The Zēlos Saxophone Quartet at Old First Concerts

Last night at the Old First Presbyterian Church, Old First Concerts presented its latest recital, a performance by the Zēlos Saxophone Quartet, which is based in the Bay Area. Each of the four members plays an instrument of different size. They are, in increasing order of size, Jonah Cabral  on soprano, Johnny Selmer on alto, Alessia Garcia on tenor, and Barry Galbreath on baritone.

Two of the works on the program were explicitly composed for this configuration of resources. Indeed, Jean Baptiste Singelee’s Opus 52, completed in 1857, was very likely the first work to be created for such a quartet. The second was written almost a century and a half later, completed by Philip Glass in 1995. Both of these four-movement pieces explored different approaches to both sonority and rhetoric. Nevertheless, the overall impact was not particularly compelling and verging on the bland.

Jonah Cabral, Alessia Garcia, Barry Galbreath, and Johnny Selmer taking their bow after their Bach performance (screen shot from the YouTube video of last night’s performance)

More interesting was how the distinctive variations in timbre across the four sizes of the instruments allowed for a particularly engaging perspective on a fugue composed by Johann Sebastian Bach. This was “Contrapunctus 4” from the BWV 1080 collection The Art of Fugue. The composer never specified instrumentation for this music, and there are those that claim it was created strictly as a pedagogical tool for would-be composers. Nevertheless, I have encountered any number of different approaches to instrumentation; and last night’s version, arranged by John McCoy, was particularly effective in guiding the attentive listener through the interplay of the four fugal voices.

The other arrangement was by Claude Voirpy, taking on Ástor Piazzolla’s four-movement Histoire du Tango suite. Many readers probably know that those movements trace the “maturing” of the tango genre from its bordello origins in 1900 to its recent emergence in concert hall performances. Voirpy’s arrangements deftly captured the changes of mood across the suite’s movements. The overall impact made this the most engaging encounter of the evening.

Taken as a whole, there was a fair amount of variety in the program. Nevertheless, the blend of sonorities led to a fair amount of sameness in spite of difference in structure and rhetoric across the four compositions. One way or another, it seems as if the expressiveness of the saxophone is better served by a free-wheeling jazz jam than by any of the efforts of composers across the generations.