Perennial champions of new music, the PRISM Quartet joins forces with Maestro Gil Rose and the ever-adventurous Boston Modern Orchestra Project in a stunning recording of concertos for saxophone quartet by William Bolcom and Steven Mackey, composers whose concert music draws collectively from rock, jazz, blues, folk, and ragtime music, and more.

National Medal of Arts, Pulitzer Prize and Grammy Award winner William Bolcom (b.1938) is a composer of cabaret songs, concertos, operas and symphonies. He intended his Concerto Grosso "purely as a piece to be enjoyed by performers and listeners." According to Bolcom, when the PRISM Quartet commission the work, "this immediately called up two precedents in my mind: the Schumann Concerto for Horn Quartet, and (of all things) the early Beatles in their mode of dress and style of movement. The first movement, Lively, in simple sonata form, evokes blues harmonies in both of its themes. Song without Words, which follows, is a lyrical Larghetto. The third movement, Valse, begins with a long solo stretch for the saxophone quartet; the development of this theme alternates with a pianissimo Scherzetto section. The final Badinerie, a title borrowed from Bach, evokes bebop and rhythm-and-blues."

Steven Mackey (b. 1956) has composed for orchestras, chamber ensembles, dance and opera. He has been honored with awards from the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship and Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Though he classifies his concerto Animal, Vegetable, Mineral as "pure music…without a text or program," it was inspired by "steep and deep" skiing in which the adventurous sportsman is dropped by helicopter onto un-groomed mountainside. As he puts it, "'Graceful' never described my skiing or musical styles, but' 'joyous', 'athletic', and 'intense' ring true in both." The work is permeated by a dramatic descending motive which plunges repeatedly from the high end of the saxophone's register, where the instrument's sound is "thin, pinched, and oxygen-starved," to its "robust, thick, and reedy" low end.

Photo credits: Photography by Teresa Tam Studio, www.teresatamstudio.com