Above: Signum Quartet (l-r) Blaz Kemperle, Jacopo Taddei, Alan Lužar and David Brand performed ‘Hollywood Songbook’ on the City Recital Hall stage with stunning lighting design by Trent Suidgeest. Image: Peter Hislop.
A definite jewel in Musica Viva’s progressive post-Covid crown is Signum Saxophone Quartet. Bringing their inimitable, incredibly full sound and a swag of astoundingly good arrangements Down Under, this exciting all-sax ensemble is taking the country by storm once more this year.
In 2022, the group’s debut performance in Sydney and about the country demonstrated the Signum brand’s immense versatility, virtuosity and velvetine timbral blend plus great variety of repertoire. The programme reached back to Bach, presenting a complete Brandenburg Concerto. Arrangements of Gershwin’s Three Preludes and Bernstein’s Symphonic Dances from Westside Story as well as Spain by Chick Corea brought us a huge and variegated event and a thrilling reed sound of orchestral scope.
This was crowned with a commission arrangement from Musica Viva of the Kurt Weill Violin Concerto Op 12, performed with Kristian Winther. This concert would be a hard act to top for any ensemble type or orchestra.
The 2025 tour,however, with its well curated concert concept has done just that. Bringing a range of arrangements of music from the modernist classical string quartet canon, orchestral works for ballet, stage and screen through to cabaret club caricatures and insightful art song, this is one wild and entertaining ride. And the collaboration with local vocalist Ali McGregor to present a huge range of early twentieth century song is one that works very well.
Above: Signum Saxophone Quartet. Image: Peter Hislop.
The arrangements by Izidor Leitinger of Prokofiev (Romeo and Juliet selections), Bernstein (dances from On The Town) and Stravinsky (Circus Polka) once again showed this quartet’s fine musicianship and line-up which is capable of conquering any genre or style of composition and bringing known orchestral music to the new, expansive sound world of the less often-heard saxophone quartet.
With an emphasis on expat, exiled European composers living in the USA from WWI to WWII, this gem of an historic snapshot added vocal music to Signum’s excellent eclectic mix. In a concert that alternated between the ballet or concert stage back to a cabaret or nite club mileu, Signum Saxophone Quarttet and vocalist delivered an added, alternating layer of music from stage, screen and art song.
The stage set for this mix of instrumental or vocal standard featured formidable lighting design by Trent Suidgeest which saluted photo shoots, filming, rainbows and more via a successful arrangement of umbrellas behind the performers, with constantly shifting colours and vibe to suit the variety on the programming.
In this successful staging and larger-than concert-life atmosphere, the costume changes and characterisations by Ali McGregor in concert with this reed consort made for a colourful, impressive journey through Europe-in America music. The Hollywood Songbook of this concert’s title referred directly to a bracket of Hanns Eisler’s compelling 1943 miniatures setting Bertold Brecht’s words.
Above: Ali McGregor wowed the audience with riveting performances of songs from the 1930s and 1940s, by composers both local to the USA and some who fled there during the Nazi uprising.
McGregor shone in the performance of the Eisler bracket in the concert’s second half. Her chameleon performances prior to this streamlined eight minutes were also well choreographed with Signum, whose dynamic accompaniments were great atmospheres of full proportion.
Highlights of McGregor’s text delivery and pointed gesture over a superb sonic layer were heard in Hollaender’s Falling in Love Again, Cole Porter’s So In Love and an iconic, new-world version of Somewhere Over The Rainbow.
The latter was an exciting conclusion to a night of renovated music from an unsettled, changing time,. McGregor’s conclusion to the song, reaching great heights above the wind tapestry was breathtaking, new and an impressive way to end a beautiful, progressibe programme.
in the hands, hearts and technique of these musicians and vocalist, this compelling pastiche proved that all that glisters is gold. Schulhoff’s instrumental dances morphed from string quartet to saxophone group, and Aaron Copland’s excerpts from the ballet Rodeo (arr. Linda Waid) were high-level advertisements for the saxophone quartet model. Bristling Bernstein was attacked and shared by Signum members in the wartime dance episodes from On The Town. These movements were lithely played and leaped off the City Recital Hall stage.
Wartime vocal music and comment on a world in crisis (tensions not unfamiliar to parts of our current time) were represented with svelte modern chic by Kurt Weill’s inimitable commentary, here deliciously delivered by vocalist and saxophones. Jumping back to pre-war optimism and to Irving Berlin (Let’s Face The Music and Dance, from 1936), the atmosphere was transcendent.
This concept is a blockbuster event-from musicological, historic, innovation and entertainment angles. The combination of Signum Saxophone Quartet on its return with our local vocal star Ali McGregor worked well, with the cause of blending musical styles and formats in the one concert pleasingly showcased.
We look forward to the next visit and future instalments of Signum Saxophone Quartet’s mastery of music in fine arrangement. Cleverly curated concerts like this one and the collaboration with a local vocalist deserve immortalisation in a recording, to endure even longer than our treasured memories of the focus period, in transportative performance here, can last and titillate our senses.
