Kenneth Tse plays the alto saxophone the way certain pianists play Chopin — with a technical command so complete it becomes invisible, leaving only music. That’s not a small thing. The saxophone remains, in the concert hall at least, an instrument still fighting for its legitimacy, still shaking off the smoky associations that have clung to it since Adolphe Sax patented his brainchild in 1846. That Tse has chosen four American concertos — none of them household names, two of them written expressly for him — says something about both his advocacy and his ambition.
Start with Creston, because Creston deserves better than the neglect he’s suffered. Paul Creston — born Giuseppe Guttoveggio in New York, self-taught, a church organist who somehow absorbed Gregorian chant, jazz, and the European symphonic tradition into a style entirely his own — wrote music that moves. His saxophone concerto, composed in 1941 when he was at something like the peak of his powers, opens with a dark, hammered insistence that immediately announces this is not going to be a showpiece. The lyricism that follows feels earned rather than applied. Tse shapes the long melodic lines with extraordinary breath control, and the University of Iowa Symphony Band under Richard Mark Heidel provides the warm, swell-and-recede support the music demands. The slow movement — transparent, almost fragile — lets a clarinet carry a languid melody above cushioned harmonies while the saxophone listens, then responds. It’s chamber music thinking in a band format. The finale has the bouncy, march-tinged energy Creston could deploy without condescension, and there’s a moment midway where everything stops being merry for just a few bars — a slight shadow crossing the sun — before the music rights itself and races home.
Ingolf Dahl is the other established name here. German-born, a refugee who landed in Los Angeles in the late 1930s and became indispensable to that city’s musical life — friend of Stravinsky, teacher of countless composers, maestro, pianist — Dahl spent nearly a decade revising his saxophone concerto, and the effort shows. This is rigorously made music, lean and knotty, with a neoclassical backbone that never quite calcifies into mannerism. The wind orchestra writing is particularly inventive; Dahl knew how to differentiate texture, how to let a solo line breathe against a carefully spaced background. Tse navigates the technical demands — and they are real — without apparent strain, though I’d have welcomed a slightly more searching tone in the lyrical passages. The Dahl is the most intellectually satisfying work here, the one that rewards repeated listening most generously.
David DeBoor Canfield’s concerto — the Martyrs for the Faith of the album’s title — is another matter. The three movements portray three historical martyrs: Polycarp, the second-century bishop burned alive in Smyrna; Gaspard de Coligny, the Huguenot admiral hacked to death on St. Bartholomew’s Night in 1572; and Jim Elliot, the American missionary killed by the Auca people in Ecuador in 1956. The program is serious. The first movement earns its seriousness — dark, formless, with violent orchestral eruptions and the saxophone wailing against heavy percussion. Coligny’s movement is a grotesque march that gradually absorbs a hymn tune, the two strands pulling against each other until the march simply exhausts itself and fades. Effective, if a little mechanical. The Elliot movement, a mambo-flavored dance with rainforest percussion, is the problem. The disconnect between the bouncy Latin rhythm and the subject of missionary martyrdom may be intentional — joy in sacrifice, or something — but it feels unresolved, like a theological argument the music can’t quite finish. Interesting once. Perhaps twice. The appeal diminishes.
John Cheetham’s concerto rounds out the program with craftsmanlike competence, though it lacks the personality of the Creston or the rigor of the Dahl. Tse plays it beautifully; Heidel’s band is attentive. But the work itself keeps promising to arrive somewhere it never quite reaches.
The release is clean and well-balanced — no small achievement with a wind band, where intonation and blend can turn treacherous in a moment. Tse’s tone is lustrous throughout, warm in the lower register, focused and penetrating above the break. This is a disc for saxophone enthusiasts first, and for the curious secondarily. The Creston and the Dahl alone justify the purchase.
