Pour Saxophone Soprano et Piano / for Solo Saxophone and Piano-André Jolivet’s Chant de Linos for Saxophone and Piano (arrangement: Carmen Lefrançois). Captivated by the magical and religious dimension of music André Jolivet (1905-1971) couldn’t help but have a predilection for the Flute a “deep expression of humankind (…) that charges sounds with what in us is both visceral and cosmic”. Eight years after the famous Incantations for solo Flute in 1936 he wrote the Chant de Linos for Flute and Piano. Its pedagogical purpose – as an examination piece for national Conservatoire students - does not mask itsgravity: in Ancient Greece it was a funeral lamento originally sung in memory of the poet Linos who lost his life to Apollo’s jealousy. In 1945 the composer transformed this piece into a powerfully charming quintet for Flute Violin Viola Cello and Harp. The Editions Leduc are publishing a transcription for Soprano Saxophone and Piano written by Carmen Lefrançois and approved by Christine Jolivet the composer’s daughter. Lefrançois beautifully avoids smothering the delicacy of the music with the Saxophone's dynamics which could prove excessive in this context. The threnody interspersed with ritual dances retains its strange beauty touching the hearts of a new generation of musicians.

for soprano saxophone and chamber orchestra. Par BRYARS GAVIN. The piece is dedicated to John Harle and the Bournemouth Sinfonietta, who commissioned it with funds made available by South West Arts. It makes use of the saxophone's ability to play long expressive melodic passages, and was written too, having seen the Sinfonietta perform, with some of its individual players in mind. Although played without a break, the piece does fall into a number of recognisable sections delineated by a change of tempo, or by a substantial shift of texture. For example, shortly before the end, there is a passage where the saxophone is accompanied by 21 solo strings - the entire string section playing divisi, followed by a coda, which contains simultaneous 'laments' (for saxophone, cor anglais, French horn, and solo violin). The Green Ray is the title of a romantic novel by Jules Verne, set in the West of Scotland, in which a peculiar atmospheric phenomenon plays the key part. A 'green ray' is seen at sunset in certain latitudes, and in certain coastal conditions, just as the sun touches the horizon and, for a brief moment, the orange sun emits a green ray of light. In the Verne story the simultaneous sighting of the ray will seal a couple's love, and the attempts of a young man to do this are constantly frustrated (by sudden clouds, by a yacht passing along the horizon, and so on). This part of Western Scotland is also the place where certain piping traditions originated. Male pipers practised in one cave on the seashore, females in another ( the 'piper's cave' and the 'pigeon's cave'). As they played their laments at twilight a triangulation, similar to that in the Verne story (male-ray-female) may well have occurred without the knowledge of the innocent participants, hence the sequence of simultaneous laments in the coda. On one occasion I witnessed the green ray in Southern California. I was returning along the coast after having climbed up Mt. Tecate, on the top of which is a house, now empty, where Evans-Wentz translated The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Gavin Bryars./ Répertoire / Saxophone Soprano et Piano

Exploiting the rich possibilities of the soprano saxophone Brian Kelly captures a range of moods in eight tuneful and distinctive vignettes that whether light-hearted or sad offer an abundance of musical enjoyment.