A 55-minute cycle of pieces for saxophone quartet might not seem a particularly enticing prospect. But in a succession of works over the last 20 years, including the remarkable Liturgia Fractal for string quartet, Sombras, for soprano, clarinet and string quartet, and Erinnerungsspuren for piano, the Spanish composer Alberto Posadas has shown that his fondness for composing pieces in linked groups, which may be performed individually or as continuous sequence, has resulted in some of the most striking music written in Europe in recent times.
Posadas has likened his way of composing to journeying through a labyrinth, and the three pieces from 2016 and 2017 that make up Poética del Laberinto (Poetics of the Labyrinth), for saxophone quartet, take examples of such structures from the the arts and the classical world as their starting points. The first piece, Knossos, reflects on the excavations of the famous Minoan palace on Crete, generally thought to be the source of the legend of the labyrinth built by Daedalus to contain the Minotaur; the title of the second, Klimmen en Dalen, is taken from Escher’s lithograph of a building with a never-ending staircase, while the third, Senderos que se Bifurcan, comes from Jorge Luis Borges’s story The Garden of Forking Paths.
But there’s nothing tritely descriptive or pictorial about Posadas’s approach; the sources are starting points for purely musical arguments. Knossos introduces each member of the quartet in turn, building up microtonal textures strand by strand, and extracting a huge range of shimmering effects – trills, glissandi, multiphonics – from the reed instruments. Klimmen en Dalen is built out of tangles of rising and falling scales and arpeggios from which it seems impossible to escape, with the sound of the instruments constantly modified by an exotic variety of mutes, while in Senderos que se Bifurcan, two tenor and two baritone saxophones trace out a series of independent lines that occasionally merge, only to separate and go in different directions again. It’s music of immense subtlety and intricate detail, and the four instrumentalists of the Sigma Project realise its myriad effects with extraordinary faithfulness.
This week’s other pick
Three recent concertos by Bent Sørensen, which are full of attractive, vivid instrumental effects, are brought together by Dacapo Records, all with their dedicatees as the soloists. Leif Ove Andsnes plays the Danish composer’s piano concerto, La Mattina, Martin Fröst is the clarinettist in Serenidad, which is inspired by a collection of Spanish poetry, while the Trumpet Concerto, with a central movement evoking a Venetian barcarolle, was composed for Tine Thing Helseth. It may be fundamentally undemanding music, but it is beautifully made.
