Three Quartets
I was delighted but also apprehensive when Rob Buckland contacted me and offered a commission to write a piece for the Apollo Saxophone Quartet (ASQ) to be premiered at the Brighton Festival, 2001. I think that writing for a Saxophone Quartet presents similar challenges to writing for a String Quartet with the additional problem of having to leave space for breathing! I have always thought of the saxophone as having an emotional range similar to that of the human voice. Its versatility knows no bounds. It was a huge challenge to write the three Saxophone Quartets, but knowing that my music was going to be performed by the ASQ with their incredible virtuosity and musicality, helped me to take chances and live dangerously. The ASQ have certainly risen to the challenge. Together, we have explored many aspects of the saxophone and often found ourselves in uncharted waters. Geoff Brown’s review in the Times of a recent concert read: Jazz rhythms met minimalism in a lyrical embrace, motifs and patterns intertwined and chased tails in music instantly attractive, but never vacuous. Allied to the music’s ebullience came the phenomenal skill of the Apollo four. Thompson’s writing made their fingers scamper off their knuckles in search of new swoops and gurgles, or the silkiest transformation from furnace blast to the softest whisper this side of the Milky Way.
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