Roger Hanschel - Roger Hanschel: Music for Saxophone & String Quartet (2020)

The saxophone plays a long, lonely melody. The tones seem to get lost in a vast, empty space, but before that happens, other voices speak up - string instruments. They sink into one's ears and, through their nervous, slow steadiness, start to excite -
Roger Hanschel approaches classical music from another angle. What may initially appear as constant or slowly changing repetitions of patterns in unusual metres - offering the platform for lyrical excursions, expressive outbursts or virtuoso escapades, often but not always by the saxophone - reveals itself to be a metamorphosis of classical forms of composition in an unaccustomed environment, of themes that wander through the instrumental parts and much more. Indian music emerges, sequences of tones that sound Ottoman, minimal music, jazz in all forms and variations and indeed, "classical music" - but honestly, what does "classical" mean today? A cliché by which each person understands something different. Reason enough, then, to follow the Auryn Quartet's need to do something different in between. Incidentally, the Auryn Quartet embarks on such excursions from its ancestral "conventional" world time and time again. Here, they offer the well-known Cologne "Saxophone Mafioso" Roger Hanschel an opportunity to show his mastership in both composition and improvisation. With insatiable curiosity, Roger Hanschel has absorbed the various components of world music and created his very own personal mixture from it. And he is a stupendous virtuoso who knows how to apply new playing techniques - including permanent breathing, for example – in a (not?) breathtaking way.