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The Southern Exposure New Music Series concert Nov. 11 will feature several world premieres performed by the New Century Saxophone Quartet and also a homecoming.
Connie Frigo, who has played baritone saxophone with the quartet for about three years, received her doctorate in saxophone performance from USC in August 2005 and is now an assistant professor of saxophone performance at the University of Tennessee.
"I can't wait to be back," Frigo said.
Other members of the group are Michael Stephenson, soprano saxophone; Stephen Pollock, tenor saxophone; and Chris Hemingway, alto saxophone.
The concert will feature the world premiere of American composer David Lang's complete Revolutionary Etudes. The quartet commissioned the work, and Southern Exposure is one of several music series and private donors who helped fund the work.
"Revolutionary Etudes explores the tone colors of the saxophone and our ability to blend our sound into one another," Frigo said. "David had a big vision for the piece. We are hoping it will become one of the major pieces of repertoire for saxophone quartet."
Dutch composer Jacob ter Veldhuis will travel from the Netherlands to attend the concert, which will feature the world premiere of the arrangement of his work Heartbreakers written for the quartet. The piece originally was composed as a jazz sextet and never has been performed in the United States. The multimedia arrangement uses both text and audio from American talk shows combined with DVD projections.
"The soundtrack to the piece was taken from snippets from American talk shows. The composer is so inspired by American pop culture," Frigo said. "The subjects he uses in most of his pieces draw upon the most colorful of American pop culture. It's a really intriguing piece, and with the DVD projection, it's going to be fantastic and engaging."
The program also will include Prodigal Child, which the quartet commissioned John Fitz Rogers to compose. Rogers is an associate professor of composition at USC and founder and artistic director of the Southern Exposure New Music Series.
"Prodigal Child is, by far, the most complex piece of music we have ever put together as a quartet," Frigo said. "It is the most rhythmically engaging piece we've ever played, the most complex, and the most high-energy piece from start to finish in our program. It quickly became a staple of our programs and gets audiences on their feet across the country."
The concert will open with selections from The Art of Fugue, by J.S. Bach, which inspired Lang to compose Revolutionary Etudes. The New Century Quartet has created an entire multimedia project based on The Art of the Fugue, Bach's last work before he died. Bach wrote the unfinished work on four staffs, and each of the four lines fits perfectly with the saxophone quartet range.
"The top line fits the soprano saxophone perfectly. The same is true of the alto, tenor and baritone. Not a note needed to be changed," Frigo said. "One of the things we always tell audiences is that even though the saxophone wasn't invented until 100 years after Bach died, he knew we were coming."
10/06
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New Century Saxophone Quartet
