Music Review : Saxophone Quartet on a Mission

Let us now praise the saxophone quartet, that neglected, street-wise entity in the music world. One hundred and 50 years after the instrument came into being, you’d think it would be farther along on the road to respect. Somewhere along the line, though, this noble and soulful instrument was pressed into service in the jazz and pop worlds, and more or less ostracized in “serious” music circles. It’s a shame, and a reality.

A sense of mission underscored Thursday’s concert by the San Francisco Saxophone Quartet at Pasadena’s Ambassador Auditorium, and not always to positive effect. The saxophonists--founder-soprano David Schrader, alto Bill Aron, tenor and keyboardist David Henderson and baritone Kevin J. Stewart--felt compelled to illustrate a basic and not particularly enlightening point: Saxophones can play chestnuts too.

With this fragmented, Classical Music 101 program, the quartet trained its unusual timbres on too-familiar materials. We heard snippets from Bach’s “Brandenburg” Concertos--which did benefit from a textural warmth and contrapuntal elan--Albinoni’s rueful Adagio in G minor, Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” and Handel’s “Water Music.” We even got a skittering dose of Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumble Bee,” gymnastically navigated by Stewart. A slice of Beethoven’s Fifth wouldn’t have been out of place.

As it happened, the concert’s only work actually written for saxophone was the 1962 Quartet No. 1 for Saxophones by Russell Howland, himself a saxophonist. The work ably tapped into the instruments’ sonorous potential, while also providing ruggedly rhythmic groundwork. The group also brought integrity to an arrangement of Gershwin’s piano Preludes, with its well-suited, blues-hued turns.

This accomplished group, discovered on the streets of San Francisco, where they still play, left the impression of trying too hard to make a point that may be ultimately beside the point. Yes, saxophones can play the classics, but why not celebrate the instrument’s innate uniqueness instead?