Emerging from collaborative saxophone and piano improvisation sessions during the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, these pieces explore the sonic and expressive possibilities of this partnership. Each piece is a musical caricature, the composer imagining his fanciful birds as larger-than-life cartoon characters represented by musical moods and gestures that are at times correspondingly exaggerated for comic or tender effect. The saxophone in “Caffeinated Robyn” flits about in response to startling interjections from the piano; both instruments in “Corporate Puffin” proceed mechanistically together as if the music is being created on a factory assembly line; in “Charming Goldfinch” the instruments begin locked in rhythmic unison before bursting apart into ecstatic independent lines; “Love Birds” pares the texture back to a rhapsodic two-part duet; and “The Angel and the Mockingbird” contrasts the restless questing of the saxophone with the accompaniment’s peaceful organ-like tremolando chords.
Adventurous performers will relish the scope the composer offers throughout these pieces to exercise their own creative freedom of interpretation. While each collection forms a satisfying group when performed as whole, individual pieces will make a pleasingly quirky contribution to a recital.
Vincent Ho is a Canadian who is widely recognised as one of the most exciting composers of his generation. He has made waves in the music world of North America despite being fairly early in his compositional career, receiving numerous prizes, accolades, and prominent commissions in a relatively short space of time. Ho’s music is rich and energetic - a unique integration of influences ranging from the visual arts, electroacoustic and natural soundscapes, traditional classical music forms, and the physical properties of the instruments and ensembles for which he writes. His music is sensual, sonorous and richly textured, and Ho gives considerable attention to the audience’s experience of his intricate sound-worlds.
