Four Saxes in Paris

George Gershwin is undoubtedly the 20th-century composer who created a meeting point between European and American popular musical culture. His great masterpieces attest to this, notably An American in Paris , written during his stay in Paris, where he went to learn European academic composition techniques. His encounter with Maurice Ravel, a composer and orchestrator among the most representative of 20th-century European music, is historic.

Four Saxes in Paris is a tribute to George Gershwin and his symphonic poem An American in Paris , from which this fantasy is taken, which includes 3 saxophones in the orchestral score (alto, tenor and baritone who also play 3 soprano saxophones). In this arrangement, the saxophone quartet surprisingly manages to reproduce all the “sound” and “swing” of this masterpiece: French in the first part, American in the second: the two souls of the saxophone!

Since 1984 with the Quartetto di Sassofoni Accademia (Gaetano Di Bacco, Enzo Filippetti, Giuseppe Berardini and Fabrizio Paoletti) in addition to the rediscovery of the original repertoire, I have made several arrangements for saxophone quartet, highlighting the peculiarities of this formation, thus contributing to the great technical-executive development of which this arrangement testifies.

Gaetano Di BACCO