Revoiced - Saxophone Quartet and Choir

Following its previous album Evoke, with the pianist Timothy End, the Ferio Saxophone Quartet returns with this exciting and innovative programme of works for saxophone quartet and voices. Founded and directed by Freddie Crowley, the Corvus Consort is a vocal ensemble based in the UK, which draws its members from a pool of young singers in the early stages of their professional careers. The project was inspired by the Quartet’s 2018 recording, Revive, an album of baroque transcriptions. Freddie Crowley writes: ‘Heinrich Schütz in the preface to his Geistliche Chor-Music, of 1648 (from which four of the items on this album are drawn) wrote: “You can perform some of these pieces [...] with an organ or instruments on the choral parts along with a full choir.”

 

The instruments he had in mind were not saxophones, of course, which would not be invented for another 200 years, but I suspect that he might have found them an excellent choice! Schütz intended his collection to be a demonstration of good composition without basso continuo, focussing on counterpoint as the foundation of compositional technique. It is these contrapuntal properties that make his and other baroque and Renaissance music so infinitely adaptable into new forms – transitioning effortlessly onto the saxophone, for example – and the same properties that underpin the four contemporary works on our album, all inspired in their own different ways by music of the Renaissance.’