John Harle reviews

"… with the original soloist, John Harle - peripatetic on the stage, but strutting magnificently - had the joyous abandon of experimental big-band jazz." (Birtwistle's Panic)

"No-one else creates a sound quite like this: apparently floating weightlessly, yet robust."

"… no-one is certainly doing more to extend the saxophone's musically restricted repertoire."

The Daily Telegraph top

"He sounds by turn louche and sleazy, wistful and romantic, and above all, incredibly sexual, the apothesis of every teenager who took up the sax because it pulled the girls…"

Evening Standard top

"Harle's tone control, which makes the top register of the legendarily temperamental soprano saxophone sound like a chorister, is one of the most remarkable phenomena on the contemporary music scene."

Reviews - Concert Performances UK

The Little Death Machine

The Little Death Machine was premiered on 6th August 2002, at the BBC Proms, London - here are some of the reviewers' reactions:

The centrepiece of the late-night concert was saxophonist John Harle's new work The Little Death Machine. Harle's exuberant, rhythmic take on a Jake and Dinos Chapman sculpture in Tate Modern gave him much opportunity to show off his own amazing virtuosity.

Stephen Pettitt, Evening Standard, 7 August 2002 top

The synthesised sounds, drawing on nearly forty years of radiophonic-style creations (including more than a nod in the direction of Delia Derbyshire), were perfectly entwined into the piece - indeed, some of the upper register stuff on the sopranino sax merged into the artificially-created soundscape, creating the kind of sounds I had certainly never heard in the concert hall before. All the while, Harle's score was light and accessible, full of playful jazz riffs.

Richard Watt, Web Review top

OSJ - known for 35 years as the Orchestra of St John's, Smith Square, founded and still conducted by John Lubbock - are marking their new identity with a commissioned piece by John Harle, The Little Death Machine. Variously motoric and funky sounds oscillated between Harle's saxes, the band and vintage synthesised sounds. Ingenious fun.

The Times, 8 August 2002 top

Vital, exhilarating, new, different, enjoyable. It is not often that all of these adjectives can be found in a review of a new piece of classical music, but they all applied last night to the world premiere of John Harle's The Little Death Machine performed by the OSJ and conducted by John Lubbock.

The piece was inspired by a work at Tate Modern, and to this listener the symbolism in the music was very clear and highly effective.

The use of amplified electronic instruments in classical music has not been terribly successful in the past, but in this piece the sounds amplified the tension and rhythm of the piece. Add to this a wonderful orchestration and John Harle's majestic saxophone playing and one had a truly memorable and magical experience.

Gareth Morgan, Web Review top

However, the highlight of the evening was a new work by saxophonist-composer John Harle. The Little Death Machine featured Harle himself, with members of the OSJ plus two sampler synthesisers. Beginning on the soprano sax the musical material was eloquently laid before us, by sax and orchestra with effective sampled sound effects in the background. The influences of serialism, jazz and minimalism could be detected, but the style had an integrity all of its own.

About half-way through the piece, Harle changed to the sopranino sax whose hauntingly piercing tone blended uncannily with the higher frequency sounds of the synthesisers. At the point the piece moved up a gear. Some of the earlier material was revisited as the emotional temperature rose, and the work reached a rousing climax as a repetitive jazz riff at the top of the range of the sopranino was pitted against a stirring march. Harle's virtuosity and originality were compelling, but the clear musical shape of the piece made it easily, and excitingly accessible at first hearing.

Ian Howarth, Web Review top

Harle writes exuberantly: early synthesisers swoop around a conventional chamber orchestra; a drum machine kicks in; it seems we are in a Bond theme, then it is on to a swathe of trip-hop.

Erica Jeal, The Guardian 8 August 2002 top

The Little Death Machine gave its composer, the saxophonist John Harle, a chance to display the same vigorous spirit that he applied to some Miles Davis and Gil Evans arrangements of Rodrigo and Falla.

Geoffrey Norris, The Daily Telegraph, 8 August 2002 top

The OSJ's ability to keep strict time was a bonus in the following new work by Harle himself, The Little Death Machine, a bracing piece for the sleepy midnight hour scored for solo sax and orchestra, including harpsichord and synthesisers.

Rick Jones, The Observer, 11 August 2002 top

John Harle's lurid The Little Death Machine, premiered in the late-night Prom, was full of spark as the saxophonist-composer's solo soared, blasted and panted over ghoulish riffs, swooping samples and a manic orchestral dance groove until this musical metaphor for vigorous sex arrived at its "little death". An engaging vehicle, it still left the sense that other composers challenge his virtuosity more dramatically, at least in concert works. This now formidable creative figure often functions best in mixing genres.

Robert Maycock, The Independent, 12 August 2002 top

The main work of the evening was the first performance of John Harle's The Little Death Machine, a concerto for soprano and sopranino saxophones and chamber orchestra with two keyboard/ sampler players. I suppose the term 'eclectic' is a well-worn one to describe much contemporary music, but it is the most apt description for this work. Driving rhythms (Stravinsky and minimalist-like in turn), 12-tone melodies and sampled electronics all played their part in this display piece for the soloist. Harle has certainly provided himself with an impressive 'calling card' as both soloist and composer - it is difficult to think of anyone else who could play such obviously fiendishly difficult music.

Harle's concerto falls into distinct sections, each with its own characteristic - jagged melodies initially, later a smooth, rather schmaltzy section for strings with synthesiser, culminating in a veritable mechanistic riot which effectively evoked the mood of the title.

Timothy Ball, Classical Source Reviews top

But it was for Dove mainly that the applause deservedly rained down at the end. Not only for programming a fine 2003 festival, but for his fun-packed Moonlight Revels, based on the Titania-Oberon-Bottom shenanigans of A Midsummer Night's Dream. This brought out a fantastic cock-fight between two virtuosos, John Wallace on trumpet and John Harle on saxophone, all egged on by some wonderfully mischievous string-playing.

Matthew Connolly, 2nd July 2003, The Times top

It ain't necessarily so - but I would be surprised if Monday's concert, if put to the vote, was not one of the festival's most popular events. That song of course featured in a "suite" from Porgy and Bess specially arranged by Ian Gardiner and with John Harle on saxophone fronting his named Big Band. The magnificent voice and presence of Willard White gave it and other favourites, Summertime and Bess, You is My Woman Now performances of style and grace. And every words could be heard throughout an evening which started with a modern jazz arrangement of Chick Corea's Children's Songs. Seated and relaxed on a stool Willard White and the Big Band treated listeners to a range of well-loved songs, from the subtlety of Night and Day to a declamatory and moving In the Beginning, God of Duke Ellington, with its mood-setting instrumental preface.

A second half of a little more gentility included John Harle's own arrangement of songs from Twelfth Night - melodic and atmospheric and here the cover tone of White's voice, allied to superb phrasing, was remarkable, while Anthony Newley's Who Can I Turn To? Was music to swoon to. Gardiner's clever arrangement of variations on Makin' Whoopee combined all that was best in a brilliantly executed and entertaining evening.

Michael Drake on King's Lynn Festival July 2000 top

The songs from Twelfth Night arranged by John Harle were wonderful with some lovely tonal colours.

Willard White felt more at ease with Kurt Weill's Lonely House, and let us hear just what he could do in the Anthony Newley classic Who can I Turn to. Cole Porter's I Get a Kick Out of You led us into the final Sammy Kahn number, Makin' Whoopee, frantically arranged by Ian Gardiner again, complete with bridal march and tangos. John Harle did warn it was the work of "a tired and emotional man", as he wished the band good luck as it launched into it!

Mood Indigo was served up as a much wanted encore - this time with real confidence because the sound problem was, for the larger part, sorted. A good night, with some lovely and not so lovely sounds, which was no fault of the great performers.

Glenis Malkin on the King's Lynn Festival July 2000 top

Quiet before the storm

Sir Harrison Birtwistle's Panic received its world premiere in the second half. Scored for saxophone (John Harle), drum kit (Paul Clarvis), wind, brass, timps and percussion, it hit the audience between the eyes: ecstatic saxophone runs spiralled upwards against thunderclaps from the drums, spitting brass chords, and flaring sustained notes from higher wind. It was as exhilarating as being caught unexpectedly in a violent thunderstorm and surrendering to the sheer elemental spectacle of it all. Neither pop nor jazz, it nevertheless reached the soul of the saxophone and revealed wonders only Birtwhistle could have found. ÉAfter the traditional jollies, Andrew Davis' speech referred to the power of art to open minds and hearts. The minority who booed Birtwhistle, and the box occupants who chose the occasion to unfurl anti-European banners, please take generous doses of art.

Last Night of the Proms, Albert Hall
Brian Hunt, Daily Telegraph, 18th Sept. 1995 top

Harrison Birtwhistle: Panic (LPO)

Four months after the event, the "scandal" of the Last Night of the Proms has only just died down in some correspondence columns. The scandal consisted, you may remember, in the programming of a 20-minute piece by Harrison Birtwhistle entitled Panic. It was generally agreed that Sir Harry's piece was less strong on thumping good patriotic tunes than Land of Hope and Glory, but there was a divergence of opinion as to whether it had serious merit or whether it should be regarded as a kind of musical whoopie cushion. A repeat performance by John Harle on Thursday, this time with the London Philharmonic under Elgar Howarth, offered the chance to reappraise the work. Finding myself last time round in the anomalous position of a Birtwhistle admirer who was yet unconvinced, I was completely won over by this second performance. Was it simply further acquaintance with a complex score? Only in part, I think: this seemed in every way a more satisfactory rendition. Under Howarth's guidance, the players of the London Philharmonic shaped this heaving mass of notation - an evocation of the Dionysian spirit of Pan - into a fire-breathing organism. The layering of the texture (brass alternating and combining with wind) was clearly audible in a way it had not been previously, over the air at least. Harle's no-holds-barred execution of the manic saxophone part, meanwhile, was this time far better integrated into the texture. Paul Clarvis, flamboyant on drums once again contributed to the exhilarating rhythmic drive of the piece.

Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, 11th Jan. 1996 top

Harle: Terror and Magnificence

There can have been few more fascinating musical collaborations this year than last night's concert featuring saxophonists John Harle and Andy Sheppard, venerable pop muso Elvis Costello, jazz keyboard player Steve Lodder, and classical singer Sarah Leonard. When distinct musical styles meet, the outcome can often be something of a curate's egg, as devotees of each genre all go away unhappy that their own particular tastes have not been satisfied. But last night's unclassifiable musical experience, which was as exquisite as the surroundings, really did provide something for everyone. Sarah Leonard's soaring soprano opened the concert, her crisp but haunting voice elegantly rising to the challenge of singing obscure 15th century English folk songs, with contemporary arrangements by Harle. Two modern jazz pieces followed, the epic sweep of Voyager, and Landscaper, which, with crashing cymbals and screeching strings, could easily have been the theme tune to an American detective series. But, as the applause suggested when he came on stage for the second half, it was Elvis Costello that many of the audience had come to see and hear. He has always been a cut or three above his contemporaries, and in this august company, Elvis, who held his notes effortlessly, was anything but out-of-his depth, despite looking more than a little tense without a guitar strap around his neck. Costello's gruff voice - he took frequent sips from a glass of water - was perfectly suited to excerpts from William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. The much-heralded new arrangement of Shipbuilding, Costello's response to the Falklands War, proved to be not that different from the original on his Punch The Clock album, but it was sung with the same anger and feeling which prompted its composition in the first place. There were a few traces of self-indulgence in the two closing pieces featuring all 15 members of the band, but the encore, a sort of Gallic jazz fusion where the voices of Costello and Leonard seemed to merge as one, completed a memorable evening.

Bridgewater Hall, Manchester
Mike Barnett, Manchester Evening News, 5th Nov. 1996 top

Haunted by Elvis and Shakespeare

A weird amalgam of jazz, 14th century French poetry, fragments of Shakespeare and snatches of Ancient Greek melody doesn't sound like the makings of a groovy night out - even if it is graced by the presence of pop's elder statesman, Elvis Costello. But when you are plundering so many sources for inspiration there's a chance of hitting on something for everyone. É But the sheer unpredictability of what was coming next was part of the evening's attraction. A text from Shakespeare is uplifted by a lush film score, a mediaeval song sounds like it could be from a lively musical set in Rio. We could expect the unexpected from Harle and his musicians. ÉSoprano Sarah Leonard took to the front of the stage during the first half for three songs. Harle had originally composed for the Michael Nyman band and anyone who knows their film music would instantly recognise the influence of Nyman, composer of The Piano, in the piece. ÉThe crowd-pleaser, if you call it that, was a marvellously mournful version of Shipbuilding, which didn't seem out of place amongst the laments of lost love and longing. There was even an encore, which was based around the sort of Celtic tune that could have happily been tapped away to by Michael Flatley, Lord of the Dance.

Bridgewater Hall, Manchester - Janet Reeder top

Elvis and pals bring Terror to Central Hall

Breaking down musical barriers is a regular pastime for Elvis Costello and saxophonist John Harle who were deep in rehearsals last week at Hackney's Central Hall. Elvis, writer of the classics Shipbuilding, I can't Stand Up for Falling Down and A Good Year for the Roses, was putting all his aggression into Shakespearean lyrics for some of Harle's latest works. Joining him on stage were internationally-renowned saxophonist Andy Sheppard, singer Sarah Leonard and Harle himself, all fine-tuning their contributions for their Terror and Magnificence tour. Blurring classical, jazz and pop music is close to an obsession for Harle, who has worked with Michael Nyman on soundtracks for the films Prospero's Books and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. Other works include the soundtrack for Prick Up Your Ears and theme music for the BBC documentary HMS Brilliant. "I think it's important to produce some work that shows everyone what cross-border music is," said Harle. Costello has been drafted in to sing three songs from Shakespeare's Twelfth Night and Elizabethan works from the poet Sir Phillip Sidney. "The pre-classical era is a very rich ground," Costello said. "Some early music is stranger than the most self-consciously contemporary music, and I think John has the right approach to it." As for the reason why Costello was chosen. Harle says: "If I chose a classical singer I don't think they would have the same kind of intense feeling about Elizabethan poetry as Elvis. I think he understands it very well and for that reason we have found a common interest." The two met while working on the score for film of Roddy Doyle's The Family. After the Terror and Magnificence tour, which culminates in a concert at the Royal Festival Hall on November 9th as part of the London Jazz Festival, the two have plans to work together again. Harle is already working on an opera based on the lives of an Elizabethan alchemist and the poets Sir Phillip Sidney and Edmund Spencer. He hopes the work, which again combines old and new will be staged at the Albert Hall with Elvis Costello in a lead role.

Preview of Terror and Magnificence
Amanda Wilkinson, Hackney Gazette, 24th Oct. 1996 top

Innovation and evocation

Perverse maybe, inspired possibly: the programmers of the Oris London Jazz Festival choose not to play it by the book. There are free jazzers, acid ravers, and Cape Verdean crooner on the bill, and last Saturday at the Royal Festival Hall, pop singer Elvis Costello could be found intoning Shakespearean sonnets alongside soprano Sarah Leonard, in front of a 15-piece band. The central work, Terror and Magnificence, was specially commissioned from classical saxophonist John Harle, who used the architect Hawksmoor as his muse. Sadly, the result s decidedly mock-Tudor. A musical fantasy which combines early polyphony, improvising saxophones and dark medieval imagery in its lyrics, sounds good on paper. But Harle's arrangements (to be continued)

London Jazz Festival
Garry Booth, Financial Times, 13th Nov.1996 top

If composer Erwin Schulhoff anticipated John Cage by 30 years with his Silent Movement, as pianist Richard Rodney Bennett noted at yesterday's recital, he also anticipated the Third Stream by a similar period.

Who, I hear you ask, is Erwin Schulhoff? Czech-born, he was a jazz pianist in Berlin in the 1920s and in 1931 wrote his Hot Sonata, now rediscovered by saxophonist John Harle and Bennett as a rare example of writing for their partnership. "A real sonata that speaks the language of jazz," Bennett enthused.

The peculiarity of it is that while it is firmly in the jazz-influenced strand of twentieth-century composition, it also anticipates harmonic developments in jazz itself. Whether Schulhoff heard his bluesy third movement played as ferociously as Harle does is debatable, but it was none the worse for that, and the fourth movement is a wonderful piece of writing that would stand alone happily.

Although physically unremarkable, in action Harle's ears are enormous. On the opening solo of Britten's Pan he exploited the resonances of the Stevenson Hall and the harmonics from the piano strings to the full, Bennett's solo contribution being a foot on the sustain pedal.

His soprano playing on Bartok and Dave Heath's reworking of that composer's Rumanian dances was a tour de force of overtones and note-bending that always operated in context.

On alto he adapts his tone to the mood of each piece - altogether more mellow on Bennett's arrangement of three Sondheim waltzes and an encore of Ellington's In A Sentimental Mood. An expanded programme with Heath on flute, bassoonist Ursula Leveaux, and David MacGuiness on harpsicord at Edinburgh's Queen's Hall tomorrow afternoon.

Keith Bruce, The Herald, 16 November 1996 top

In introducing yesterday afternoon's concert of chamber music at the Queen's Hall, saxophonist John Harle's description of it being a mixture of ancient and modern could hardly have been more accurate, except perhaps for that that of the pianist Richard Rodney Bennett, who simply summed it up as eccentric.

Two songs by John Dowland somehow sat quite happily, if surprisingly, alongside the recently rediscovered and aptly named Hot Sonata by Schulhoff. While it, in all its glorious sultry sassiness of Thirties smoky cabaret and punchy assertiveness, was originally written for alto sax and piano, the gentle lilt of 16th century Dowland could have no inkling of what the late 20th century could do to it.

Soprano sax and harpsichord may seem unlikely, but they donned a flawless beauty in their calming simplicity as played by John Harle and David McGuiness, whose natural affinity with the repertoire was even more marked in the solo partita, La Monica, by Frescobaldi.

More than an accompanist, Richard Rodney Bennett inspires 100 per cent plus confidence. Deeply understanding, he also partnered Dave Heath in his Out of the Cool, a virtuosic flight of the imagination, heard here in a version for flute and piano.

Carol Main, The Scotsman, 18 November 1996 top

Against the irony of the best music being the least well played, I should point out that after the Copland, the evening took a dramatic and distinctly urban up-turn. Given a clear, rhythmic base and some crunchy block chords, the BBCCO perform with a kind of loony verve that can raise a smile from even the dourest critic. And given a star soloist - in this case saxophonist John Harle - they'll rise to the occasion with more enthusiasm than many a more polished orchestra. They swooned effectively through Raksin's intense Laura, menaced in Waxman's A Place in the Sun, and gave muscle to Harle's shrieking contempt in Herrmann's Taxi Driver.

Anna Picard, Independent on Sunday, 19 August 2001 top

Her Majesty was otherwise engaged, opening a minor sporting event somewhere. But I feel sure she would have enjoyed even the less obviously royalist numbers of The Oriana Collection, a joint commission by the BBC and the King's Singers from seven composers and seven poets to mark her Golden Jubilee.

The gentle eco-agitprop of John Harle's funny-sad Royal Ring Road (Iain Sinclair) included a splendid Mrs Thatcher soundalike.

Stephen Pettitt, The Standard, 26 July 2002 top

To be noted, however, was the composer's choice of the practice of "shadowing" between John Harle on saxophones and cellist Julian Lloyd Webber in this new Double Concerto. To Nyman, this was suggested by analogy with the famous shadow of a burnt-up human form preserved in the relics of Hiroshima; rather a grim provenance, one might feel, to justify the use of a pretty standard technique of 20th-century music.

In fact, a no less striking pairing of instruments was that of cello with the glitter of marimba and vibraphone, splashes of colour like bright blooms in a piece that was settled in darker hues. As befits a work initiated by our most ardent advocate of the British cello repertoire, the concerto gave much of its substance to Lloyd Webber, who built bridges to Harle through the near identity of tone shared by their instruments in certain registers. In the matrix of this relation were bred violent unisons for the soloists, while arching phrases for saxophones above the cello's frenetic activity recalled the style of the Michael Nyman band. Stridently amplified, the content of the piece resided less in its themes than in its boundless energy. Jagged tunes and a "mystery" waltz rubbed shoulders in a process of evolution that was not in itself profound. What counted was the pay off; a sense of catharsis found uniquely in Nyman's art. That's what the audience wanted. And with Harle and lloyd Webber tested yet surviving, at the end they got it, plus or minus the subjective kansei.

Independent 11 March 1997 top

Some soul-medicine by John Harle premiered at the Salisbury Festival last Sunday: at least, Salisbury says it was a premiere. But the BBC calls it a "preview", on the grounds that the score - a chamber opera called Angel magick - has been commissioned by the Beeb for this year's Proms.

Premiere or preview, it's about the Elizabethan alchemist John Dee, with a David Pountney libretto as densely allusive as Harle's score, which is an eclectic fusion of ancient (including a consort of viols) and modern (guitars, drum-kit) with bits of jazz, Tudorbethary and easy-listening modernism circumnavigating each other in a diverting dance of styles.

All that's missing is a virtuoso solo sax (John Harle, alas, conducts the piece and doesn't play in it). But otherwise it treads the sort of crossover ground in which Harle struck gold before with his Terror and Magnificence disc. My one reservation was whether it's really for the stage. I'd call it radio drama, or maybe an erudite form of radio cabaret; which means that however it looks at the Albert Hall (probably lost in space), it should at least sound well on air.

Michael White, Independent on Sunday, 31 May 1998 top

A sax player takes baton

A saxophonist will be conducting the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic in the local premiere of Sir Paul McCartney's symphony Standing Stone at the Philharmonic Hall this month.

Not just any saxophonist, mind you: John Harle is also a film composer and worked with Sir Paul on Standing Stone.

And Harle will be conducting his own work Silencium Suite at the same concert on June 20.

Sir Paul's piece has had a mixed reaction among critics, many being pretty impressed, others not so.

My colleague, music critic Rex Bawden, was one of those not impressed by the piece after listening to the recording; on the other hand, I heard it on the original radio broadcast and thought it wonderfully mysterious and moving.

Saxophonist Harle plays jazz as well as "serious" music and has premiered a number of modern works including the notorious saxophone concerto by Harrison Birtwistle at the Last Night of the Proms in 1995.

The Liverpool Echo, June 1998 top

The Salisbury Festival began on Saturday with John Harle conducting his own composition, Silencium Suite, in the Cathedral. The wide-ranging voices of the two sopranos, Sarah Leonard and Nicole Tibbels, were striking in a three-movement concert version of the theme tune from the BBC drama series Silent Witness - unexpectedly jazzy in places.

The Salisbury Festival Chorus went on to accompany the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra in a rendition of Paul McCartney's Standing Stone. Dressed in colourful shirts, the choir looked good and were easy to see against the effective backdrop of a festival wall hanging from artist Ali Pretty.

This interesting symphonic poem, McCartney's second large-scale classical creation, passed through crescendos then lulled before its familiar finale.

Western Gazette, 28 May 1998 top

The conclusion, when it mercifully arrived, was so beautiful it could knock your socks off, and pure McCartney.

Conductor John Harle's composition Silencium was by contrast haunting and worthwhile with magical singing from Sopranos Sarah Leonard and Nicole Tibbels.

New Forest Post, 4 June 1998 top

Conductor John Harle - one of McCartney's team of collaborators and advisers - procured a thoroughly professional performance from the RLPO and Choir on Saturday night.

William Leece, Daily Post, 22 June 1998 top

The synthesised sounds, drawing on nearly forty years of radiophonic-style creations (including more than a nod in the direction of Delia Derbyshire), were perfectly entwined into the piece - indeed, some of the upper register stuff on the sopranino sax merged into the artificially-created soundscape, creating the kind of sounds I had certainly never heard in the concert hall before. All the while, harle's score was light and accessible, full of playful jazz riffs.

Richard Watt, Web Review top

Stephen Pettitt, Evening Standard, 7 August 2002 top

The piece was inspired by a work at Tate Modern, and to this listener the symbolism in the music was very clear and highly effective.

Gareth Morgan, Web Review top

This enjoyable late night Prom continued the Spanish theme of this year with works by Gimenez, Rodrigo and Falla.

About half-way through the piece, Harle changed to the sopranino sax whose hauntingly piercing tone blended uncannily with the higher frequency sounds of the synthesisers. At the point the piece moved up a gear. Some of the earlier material was revisited as the emotional temperature rose, and the work reached a rousing climax as a repetitive jazz riff at the top of the range of the sopranino was pitted against a stirring march. Harle's virtuosity and originality were compelling, but the clear musical shape of the piece made it easily, and excitingly accessible at first hearing.

The Little Death Machine was sandwiched between two of Miles Davis and Gil Evans arrangements of Spanish music, originally for trumpet, and jazz orchestra; tonight Harle used the transcription for soprano sax. The slow movement of the Rodrigo guitar concerto was the more extended and effective of the two, the famous tune being a ste moved up a gear. Some of the earlier material was revisited as the emotional temperature rose, and the work reached a rousing climax as a repetitive jazz rif

John Harle's saxophone solos gave the Rodrigo a raw, urgent edge, and under the conductor John Lubbock, the ensemble - a mixture of classical and jazz players - brought out the evocative subtleties of the orchestration.

Harle's new saxophone concerto The Little Death Machine - Harle writes exuberantly: early synthesisers swoop around a conventional chamber orchestra; a drum machine kicks in; it seems we are in a bond theme, then it is on to a swathe of trip-hop.

Erica Jeal, The Guardian 8 August 2002 top

Geoffrey Norris, The Daily Telegraph, 8 August 2002 top

In Tuesday night's 10pm performance, saxophonist John Harle blew Davis's version of the slow movement (Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez) through his evocative soprano instrument and against a rather rigid accompaniment from the Orchestra of St John's under John Lubbock.

Rick Jones, The Observer, 11 August 2002 top

Robert Maycock, The Independent, 12 August 2002 top

Timothy Ball, Classical Source Reviews top

"But it was the gorgeous serenity of the finale that provided the most telling contrast to Beamish's saxophone concerto, the primitive passion of which brought out the wildest of emotions from soloist John Harle in a performance sizzling with drama and screaming with expression".

Kenneth Walton, The Scotsman top

"Saxophonist John Harle returned to the piece he performed with the SCO three years ago and was as magisterial as always. It was only at the opening of the piece that the richness of the lower strings of the SSO threatened to swamp the balance.

Harle is a player who bridges genres with ease and Beamish requires him to twist his fingers round some post-bop figures before he offered his own jazz-rooted cadenza. Percussion here includes cross-rhythms tapped on cellos and basses and timpanist Gordon Rigby slapping away with his palms. Terrific stuff".

Keith Bruce, The Herald top

"Your man for these surroundings is John Tavener. Total Eclipse has bouts of violent articulation and thunderous timpani, but they are done with sustained notes and far-flung deployment across the transepts and behind the dome. The result is a well-judged, gripping and completely audible impact. John Harle's screeching saxophone metamorphosed into tender melody - the piece is about the conversion of St Paul - and the heart of the score was a series of little Stravinskian trios for saxophone, tenor (James Gilchrist) and counter-tenor (the highly expressive Robson again), interspersed with luminous choir and a confident, vibrant solo treble (Max Jones).

Robert Maycock, The Independent top

"Tavener exploits to the limit the cathedral's vast 10-second reverberation, and begins by bombarding us with a barrage of sound from all sides in an awesome depiction of the Crucifixion, against which Harle's sax can be heard screaming flutter-tongued imprecations. The tumult is gradually stilled as the voice of Christ (James Gilchrist) drifts down from the dome. Harle's raving is gradually replaced by arpeggiated lyricism. Robson, hitherto silent, finds both voice and words as Paul's conversion is effected.

Tim Ashley, The Guardian 22 June 2000 top

….It's probably fairly obvious that I was not expecting any Damascene conversion to Tavener, but the start of Total Eclipse, which depicts the blinding of that didactic old warhorse St Paul, was surprisingly effective. In the north and south transept timpani rolled and crashed and surged in relay, causing the audience to move their heads slowly from right to left to right to left in search of the source of the sound. The obvious analogy is Wimbledon, but the reality was far more disquieting - like a frame-by-frame denial. It made me think of sunglasses or goggles and the photographs of nuclear blasts at Los Alamos. So blinding of one sort came to mind, if not specifically that of St Paul, and I started to wonder if I'd been too dismissive of Tavener over the years. Alas, the remaining 55 minutes were true to his usual form and I slid back into frustration under Tavener's trademark wash of sound.

There were roughly five separate elements of sound arranged about the building - a polychoral effect beloved of Monteverdi and Gabrieli. But in Tavener's less imaginative hands it was like having the same flashcards repeatedly held in front of you - chaos/calm, chaos/calm - and the originality of the ensemble (and the contrast between modern and baroque sound) was lost in Tavenerism. It was the same old thing: endless antiphons, Orthodox(ish) chants with "eastern" quartertone catches, darkly spooky chords, inexorable chromatic descents, and the pure high Cs of the admirably cool treble soloist. The chord progressions at the close of each choral antiphon were pure C of E schmaltz - to the extent that I half expected to hear a solo voice sing "bloooooo" in tribute to Stanford's The Bluebird. John Harle's virtuosic saxophone played every trick in the book, doing the work of several instrument families (a shawm, the spiked strings of Herrmann's Psycho, a human scream, and the jagged bebop improv beloved of classical composers trying to be hip) echoed by the plaintive oboe of Frank de Bruine in the Whispering Gallery. The strings dutifully darkened their major thirds and patiently held the attenuated, spacey clusterchords. But despite truly excellent performances from all concerned - especially James Gilchrist, whose fresh, immediate tenor makes even Ian Bostridge sound a bit jaded - the sum of the parts did not add up to any convincing whole.

Anna Picard, The Independent on Sunday, 25 June 2000 top

It's the grunt that gives it character
The saxophone, the programme notes would have us believe, "has become one of the few instruments to bridge the divide between classical and contemporary music". Well, no, actually. Whereas most of the instruments appropriated by jazz - trumpets, pianos, drums - are at home in any genre, the saxophone is a staple of the combo, but a special effect in any classical ensemble.

The reason was there to hear in John Harle's performance of Poulenc's Oboe Sonata, transcribed by the composer for soprano sax. It is the wind instrument on which it is easiest to stamp a personal sound but, played purely, it has little personality.

The Ironmongers' Hall acoustics did not help attempts to play quietly, and Harle's tone tended to glare. The elegance of the original survived only in Richard Rodney Bennett's aristocratic playing of the piano part: oddly, the keyboard instrument proved better able to sing the dreamy tune in the middle of the scherzo.

In the last movement, however, where an exotic, mournful chant floats over tolling piano chords, the saxophone came into its own. Chick Corea's Three Children's Songs had something of the same atmosphere of incantation; so, too, did Britten's Pan (originally one of the Metamorphoses for oboe).

The incongruity of the setting (dark wooden panelling, stern portraits in gilt frames) added to the pleasant sense of strangeness, as did the device of holding down the sustain pedal of the unplayed piano for the Britten. A halo of harmonics shimmered round every phrase.

In repertoire more closely related to jazz, Harle was able to indulge in all the husky and gurgly impurities that give the instrument such an intimate presence. His tone stayed fairly straight for the first two movements of Schulhoff's Hot Sonata, then acquired plenty of grunt for the petulant blues of its slow movement. Bartok's Romanian Dances, freely arranged by Dave Heath with an acknowledged Miles Davis influence, whooped and shouted thrillingly.

Bennett's beautiful transcription of three waltz songs by Sondheim reminded us what lovely and literate music lies below some of those tricksy lyrics; and Benett's own Three Piece Suite - suave and genial - proved that contemporary music can be thoroughly approachable and intellectually alert.

Brian Hunt Daily Telegraph top

Suite sound is scarily good
Quite a coup for Aberdeen Alternative Festival, this one. The world premiere of a suite by John Harle, with parts for himself, fellow saxophonist Andy Sheppard, and the voices of Sarah Leonard and Elvis Costello. As if the front four were not impressive enough, the back line included the Lyric string quartet, Steve Lodder on keyboards, Henry Lowther on trumpet, bassist Chris Laurence, and the splendid Paul Clarvis on drums.

As you might suspect from that roster, we are dealing here with music that defies easy classification, but as anyone who has been wise enough to purchase the Argo CD will be aware, Terror and Magnificence it is very probably one of the finest suites to have come from the pen of a British composer in recent years. Harle is a virtuosic saxophonist but his writing talent is clearly as significant. The Shakespearean How should I my true love know, sung by Leonard and the hugely moving O Mistress Mine, sung by Costello, are freshly minted but sound like lost gems of Elizabethan soul. His collaborations with Stanley Myers, Voyager and Landscaper, are prime examples of movie soundtrack that is well worth the concert hall platform.

For a first night of demanding music, the performance was remarkably free of ragged edges, particularly given the level of technology - unselfconsciously used - involved. Harle's sensitivity to the acoustic (playing off-mike at times) was reflected in a collective awareness that perhaps explained Costello's evident, and rather endearing, nervousness in such company. It only evaporated after some wag in the audience (whom I'm sure I've heard before) shouted a request for Psycho, more in joke than expectation. They did do Shipbuilding, though, and it was affectingly much more than a sop to the EC fans. A triumph all round.

Keith Bruce, The Herald top

Jazz arrived around the beginning of the 20th century, was patronised, ignored, misunderstood or dismissed for most of it, and approaches the millennium with a better than even chance of being perceived as a crucial buttress of the classical music of the century to come.

At the Barbican at the weekend, concluding their highly successful tour, three skilful, imaginative and open minded performers - classical saxophonist John Harle, jazz saxophonist Andy Sheppard, and jazz/ classic pianist Steve Lodder - exploited some of the most invigorating possibilities.

The music of Harle, Sheppard and Lodder is very fast moving, urgently collaborative, often witty, sinewy, ironic and urban. Working independently in the first half, the two saxophonists present their more orthodox selves - Harle on a repertoire of Debussy, Dowland, Michael Nyman; Sheppard with Carla Bley material and his own brand of quirky postbop originals.

Harle's tone control, which makes the top register of the legendarily temperamental soprano saxophone sound like a chorister, is one of the most remarkable phenomenon on the contemporary music scene. He applied it exquisitely to Debussy's delicate Syrinx, Ravel's Habanera, and then to Russian composer Edison Denisov's squally Sonata.

Harle took things back to more demure material with some graceful transcription of Dowland lute music, and the melodic intricacies of Chick Corea's Children's Songs.

Sheppard opened his account with about as drastic an affirmation of African-American rootsiness as he could - a raucous piece of gospel shouting on tenor sax, Carla Bley's The Lord is Listenin' to Ya, Halleluja.

But the highest-profile episodes of their collaboration were two pieces that each saxophonist had written for the trio to play together. Sheppard's Trapeze was a technical cliffhanger of fast, downward-spinning scales for the two sopranos, followed by solos, (Sheppard cooler and jazzier, Harle straying powerfully into abstract soprano territory) shifting into a soft, padding jazz feel, and then the chordal helterskelter of Coltrane's Giant Steps.

Harle's Terror and Magnificence based on a 14th century poem by Guillaume de Machaut, mixed frail, tender soprano mantras with baleful recitation in French, bursts of open lyricism, then explosive passages of pre-recorded percussion leading into funk. Some of the tonal contrasts were dazzling, though the idiomatic jumps should maybe have stopped short of splicing disco grooves with medieval French poetry.

John Fordham, The Guardian top

The centenary season of Henry Wood Promenade Concerts came to an impudent, but good-natured end on Saturday. It was like the last assembly of term with everyone vying to see how much naughtiness they could get away with before the headmaster, who had issued a plea to tone down the frivolities, stormed on to the stage and put the whole school in detention. Listening to Sir Harrison Birtwistle's new piece, Panic, was like being caned unjustly. What did we do to deserve it? Andrew Davis furiously beat three in a bar, but there was no sense of three, or indeed any sort of pulse, in what was produced by the instruments (an alto saxophone, a preponderance of drums and the whole BBC Symphony Orchestra except the strings). John Harle, sax, blew coarse low notes, wailed, screamed and brayed like an ass in apparent free time. Paul Clarvis, Professor of Drum-Kit at the Royal Academy of Music, whacked his many instruments spasmodically.

Still, and this is the point, everyone looked as if they knew what they were doing. Music is becoming ever more visual. It is beginning to think it doesn't matter what it sounds like, as long as it looks the part. It courts television, but television does nothing for it except make musicians aware of their appearance. Harle wore spats and a German stormtrooper's outfit and stood in the middle of the fiddless stage while cameramen crept round him, transmitting groovy shots into the nation's living rooms. How the hum of the boosting generators interfered with the subtler numbers on the programme so that they could do this!

Rick Jones, Evening Standard top

Forget those reports of a staid Last Night. This was as noisy as they come: trumpets blared, people thwacked things you've never seen before, and obsessed-looking saxophonist wandered around bellowing like a bull in a field of cattle. And that was just the music.

Panic about Panic, Sir Harrison Birtwistle's controversial commission, was premature. Nothing could have interrupted it short of a nuclear test, and that would have had to catch the two brief lulls. Half the time you couldn't even hear what the woodwind were doing. This was a quarter-hour of fast, male violence, both as sound as musical feeling - the ultimate up-yours piece. For the first few minutes the audience looked wither awed or dumbstruck, and only the party atmosphere took the shock away.

But Panic is ultimate Birtwistle, of one sort - like his Earth dances after Olympic training - and it ought to shock. It will now do the rounds of the braver orchestras where we can discover whether the sound balance comes off. Overall it's shaped even more dramatically than usual, the music stretching out and intensifying in its final stages as though Pan himself were growing more gigantic by the second. The long, distended, but barely broken solo melodic line is another extreme in Birtwistle terms - so far. John Harle played it with astonishing physical and expressive power, and the drummer, Paul Clarvis, matched precision with brilliance.

Robert Maycock, Independent top

The closing span of this year's Centennial Proms has been distinguished by premieres from three of the top composers now working. I was unable to catch Luciano Berio's choral setting of Celan, specially designed to precede Mahler's 'Resurrection' Symphony on the penultimate night. The two other novelties, Harrison Birtwistle's Panic for saxophone, jazz drummer and windband, and Elliott Carter's adagio tenebroso for large orchestra, both made a powerful impression. Though completely different, each is built to last.

Which is possibly surprising in the case of Panic since it was still more specific to its context than the Berio, commissioned with characteristic flair by Sir John Drummond for the Last Night, a parting blow before he lays down his staff. He could not have chosen better. I don't think any living composer could have faced such a challenge so naturally and so successfully. Birtwistle is an unregenerate modernist unpalliated by charm, nostalgia and cultural heritage whether purposeful or desperate. He has broadly speaking two voices - ultra-refined, intense, compressed (in his own Celan settings) and loud, abrasive, primeval. This latter can clearly meet the traditional last-nighters on their own ground, and indeed the nature of the occasion brings out the latently popular, even populist, character of Birtwistle's 'uncouth' side, with its affinity to the wilder reaches of pop and rock. Any other composer would have truckled to please, or steadfastly defied the obvious. Birtwistle, while affecting indifference to the circumstances, has followed them to a T without selling or copping out. As his saxophonist, the recklessly brilliant John Harle, said in a pre-concert interview, 'I think Harry has risen to the Last Night secretly.'

Robin Holloway, The Spectator top

"Land of Hope and Glory and Jerusalem at the Last Night of the Proms were overshadowed by a new composition one critic described as sounding "like a cat being throttled". Next year expect Last Night of the Toms.

Most people tuning in to The Last Night of the Proms on BBC1, I would imagine, had never heard of Sir Harrison Birtwistle. The inclusion of his work for saxophone, called 'Panic', in the programme was an atrocity of epic proportions. It was like sitting down for dinner in a reliable restaurant and being presented with an hors-d'oeuvre of cold sick. The Last Night of the Proms should be an occasion for familiarity and reassurance, not avant-garde experimentation. If it was intended to bring Sir Harrison's work to a wider audience, all that has been achieved is to ensure that his name is now reviled throughout the land. I should be amazed if 'Panic' is ever performed in public again, let alone committed to compact disc.

"It is the traditional celebration of everything that is British - but an avant-garde piece struck a bad note with millions of listeners to the Last Night of the Proms.

The new composition, called Panic, by Sir Harrison Birtwistle left BBC switchboards jammed with complaints.

John Major and other VIP guests clearly enjoyed their evening at the Royal Albert Hall, but some orchestra members expressed "mixed feelings" about the modernist music."

"There are three things that really thrilled me this year. One was an exhibition, Drawing The Line, at the Whitechapel Gallery. I never thought drawing could be so evocative. The second was Dan Massey's performance as Furtwangler in Ronald Harwood's play, Taking Sides. Knowing he'd been fighting cancer and was still able to come up with this was astonishing. The third was John Harle's playing of the saxophone in the Birtwistle piece, Panic, at the last night of the Proms. There had been quite a lot of feeling against it, but he threw this piece off with virtuosity. It was very special for me."

".. There was another discordant note to the night, which ended for the Majors at the nearby 190 Queen's Gate restaurant - a horrible cacophony without any form of melody which the BBC, which runs the Proms, commissioned from Accrington-born Sir Harrison Birtwistle, 60, and aptly titled Panic.

For the first time in memory, a Last Night offering was greeted by boos and the BBC switchboard was jammed with complaints about the clash of saxophone and drums. Among others I would have been happy to have chained, Birtwistle, whose work has been called 'sonic sewage', naked to the railings outside as punishment.

Nigel Dempster, Daily Mail top

…These were abundantly displayed by another concerto - Panic, for alto saxophone, drum kit and a 24 piece wind band including timpani and a percussion part to set off against the solo one. Cacophony is certainly the story here; and when I first heard the work, during the 1995 Last Night of the Proms, for which it had been commissioned, I was inclined to go along with the scandalised majority in finding the cacophony indeed opaque. Never again. Transferred from the oceanic acoustic of the Albert Hall to the relatively intimate dryness of the Barbican, Panic reveals a wealth of polyphonic detail. At the same time, the precipitous rhythmic drive, the utter rebarbativeness and Pan-ic wildness of this 17 minute homage to the demigod were even more sensational. This account with the original soloists, John Harle and Paul Clarvis - both peripatetic on the stage, but Harle strutting magnificently - had the joyous abandon of experimental big-band jazz.

Sunday Times - Paul Driver top

Sally Beamish called her new saxophone concerto The Imagined Sound of Sun on Stone. The title isn't a fanciful irrelevance. Even without it, a listener might well conclude that bold contrasts of light and darkness were taking place in the music. Quietly pulsating sounds (string players tapping on their instruments) suggest ancient ritual - an invocation to the sun gaining in intensity and bringing about the concerto's climax. At the high point it is as if darkness is suddenly dispelled by the glaring brilliance of the saxophone in a radiant, elemental C major. It isn't hard to imagine yourself witnessing a miraculous sunrise from the heart of a northern stone circle.

This is a stunning work - dramatic, cogent with climaxes built powerfully, and the final dissolution brought about deftly. John Harle was a superb soloist, making the saxophone sing edgily one moment, then ecstatically the next. Under Joseph Swenson the Scottish Chamber Orchestra played as though the work had been in their repertoire for years.

The Scotsman, Stephen Johnson top

The orchestra played mostly with straight faces. Saxophonist John Harle took over the second half and blew themes from Herrmann's Taxi Driver and Raksin's Laura with film-buff cool. His tone was beautifully clear-cut. Was he amplified? I saw no mike.

Evening Standard, Rick Jones top

No, the evening only really came alive when ace saxophonist John Harle emerged through the fog of 50 years of smoke filled rooms shot in grainy monochrome and Hollywood's sleaze-factor came into play Raskin's Laura, Waxman's A Place in the Sun, Bernstein's own brassy The Man with the Golden Arm. Best of all, Herrmann's last score for Taxi Driver, with Harle streetwise and lonely, all aching melismas and primal howls at the moon. Hollywood on the edge, this Prom at its best.

Independent, Edward Seckerson, 22 August 2000 top

On Wednesday, works by Villa-Lobos and Glazunov were heard; on Friday the LMP Chamber Ensemble with John Harle presented works by Krommer, Francaix and Chick Corea. And there's the rub: there's no shortage of material for saxophone in the jazz world, but players rarely straddle both. Harle is that rare player. Neither Villa-Lobos's Fantasia for Soprano Saxophone and Orchestra, nor Glazunov's Concerto for Saxophone and Strings can be counted as "important" musically. But in the hands of a player of Harle's distinction, any compositional weakness is brushed aside by superlative performance.

Independent, Annette Morreau top

Music is plagued by too many definitions, when there should only be two - good and bad.

This was good: The premiere of a collaboration between John Harle, the UK's top saxophonist, and opera/oratorio singer Willard White.

Although Harle has commissioned classical concert works for his instrument, the two musicians met on mutually agreeable ground, paying homage to jazz arrangers and great lyricists.

Makin' Whoopee (the title of a Gus Kahn standard) provided the ideal splicing for Harle's backing band of piano, strings, brass and percussion - made for an informal yet classy set, with the cross-over atmosphere of night club and recording studio.

The latter impression owed much to Willard White's relaxed presence with high stool and microphone, and John Harle's regular switching between playing alto and tenor saxophones, and conducting from sheet music arrangements.

Prime among new treatments was the fabulous blending of Gershwin numbers from Porgy and Bess, by Iain Gardiner, head of composition at LIPA.

Gershwin's most famous vocal work did, after all, enter the repertoire of the New York Metropolitan Opera 50 years after its 1935 Broadway launch.

There was particular lyricism, too, in Harle's own arrangement of songs from Shakespeare's Twelfth Night - a grouping originally made for Elvis Costello.

The bonus here was some spoken text from White - lest we forget that, apart from a distinguished singing career, he also claimed an Olivier acting Award for Othello.

A good time, too, for remembering craftsmen like Cole Porter, who made song lyrics into the prime poetry of the 20th century.

Star Rating: Classy Joe Riley, Liverpool Echo, July 2000 top

John Harle, the saxophone player for whom Birtwistle wrote Panic (a far rowdier affair than Punch and Judy) for the Last Night of the Proms, was a London Mozart Players featured artist at St John's Smith Square in London last week. This chamber orchestra, celebrating its fiftieth anniversary season, has struggled to shape a clear identity in a sated market. Jane Glover's bold counter-pointing of Mozart with our contemporaries in her reign as music director in the late Eighties has nervously shifted to Mozart and his contemporaries under the current director, Matthias Bamert.

This was reflected in the unusual but reassuring repertoire for Harle's two concerts - in the first, Glazunov and Villa-Lobos. In the second, Mozart's contemporary, Krommer, and Jean Francaix, the octogenarian French composer whose music fizzes like sherbet and dissolves instantly the last note is heard. The best piece was by the American jazz musician Chick Corea. His Children's Songs, for saxophone and string quartet using players from the LMP, were funny, hyperactive and full of bravura, and showed Harle at his exciting best.

Thanks to Harle and a handful like him, the saxophone is among the few instruments, apart from percussion and guitar, to have grown in status in the twentieth century, prompting an eclectic array of new works, especially from British composers. Its strange, rude earthiness, combined with velvety lyricism and an oriental, keening poignancy gives it a versatility that composers such as Mark-Anthony Turnage have been keen to exploit. Among the conservative, it has faced something akin to class prejudice. It may yet emerge as the paragon of wind instruments - their finest singer.

Fiona Maddocks, The Observer top

For several seasons, the organisers of the Proms have been keen to open up their event to a wider audience. With this firmly in mind, they again devoted an entire concert to music from the movies - arguably the most popular form of mass entertainment.

This year's concert on Tuesday was a sell-out, as was the first in 1999. The reason for this is easy to understand. After all, most of us can instantly recall at least one favourite film tune. But the experience of such a concert is much more sublime than you might think. Freed from their accompanying screen image, and performed by a live orchestra, these tunes take on their full emotive impact.

You realise just how much they contribute to the success of a film - and how many have been absorbed into the soundtrack of our own lives. Hollywood's Golden Age was the theme chosen for this year's movie music Prom.

As the title suggests, the selection concentrated on films affectionately known as "classics" from a bygone era, the eldest being Taxi Driver from 1976. Conducting was Elmer Bernstein who, as the composer and conductor of some of Hollywood's most famous scores, knew what he wanted from the orchestra.

Bernstein first led his musicians into the majestic sounds of Roman epic Ben Hur, composed by Miklos Rozsa. Gongs rumbled, drums rolled and the evocative seductive strains of the wind section transported the audience to exotic plains and visions of Charlton Heston's dignified face.

On the same grandiose theme was Bernstein's own music to The Ten Commandments, also starring Heston.

Wilful yearning emphatically large sounds, interspersed with wistful flutes, artfully conveyed the heroism and humanity of the Old Testament. Equally human was Tara's theme from Gone With the Wind, by Max Steiner. Its now celebrated winsome motive conjured up the wilful yearning and romanticism of the film's heroine Scarlett O'Hara, played by Vivien Leigh.

Elsewhere, Dimitri Tiomkin's medley A President's Country jokily imitated horses hooves using empty coconuts.

Then, the programme took on a very different tone when saxophonist John Harle took over.

Sexy, sassy and hyper tense was the flavour of Harle's selection as he alternately blasted and winnowed his sax through the threatening themes to Herrmann's Taxi Driver and Raksin's Laura.

And you could almost smell the back-room whisky and cigarette smoke by the time Harle took on the dynamic, doom-ridden theme from Frank Sinatra's gambling thriller The Man with the Golden Arm.

Elated Bernstein returned to cap the night's performance. He chose two of his greatest themes from The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape. And the now elated audience whistled its way through the second.

Film music makes grand instant statements - it has to, to capture fleeting moods and images on screen.

In a concert setting, where one theme is backed onto the next, the effect can be unsettling.

Like on a roller coaster ride, your emotions are taken to a sudden high only to be left suspended and leaving you feeling incomplete.

The best way to overcome this sensation is to close your eyes and let imagination fill in the gaps.
But, eyes open or shut, it would be a difficult listener who was not left with a greater appreciation of music and the fantasy of film.

Rebecca Thomas top

To ensure their commercial success, today's "classical" music CDs almost always must cross genres, and that's not good news for music lovers. Most of the time, crossover CD's are just cynical rip-offs of two consumer groups at once, and the end product appeals to no one who is seriously interested in either of the original ingredients. Placido Domingo sings Beck and The Boston Pops play Slim Whitman can't be too far off, and the only winners in pairings like these are novelty seekers and the record company that can briefly excite their over stimulated nerve endings.(Would you admit to still owning a copy of Rick Wakeman's Journey to the Centre of the Earth?)

Given this reality, it is hard not to be sceptical, even bitter, when you hear about Terror and Magnificence, a new CD of music composed and played by English classical saxophonist John Harle. Disdaining mere two-way crossover, Harle grabs for several genres all at once. During the CD's seventy-three minutes, here are some of the things that happen: (1) in a gravelly voice, a sad but wise Elvis Costello affectingly croons songs from Shakespeare's Twelfth Night; (2) Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells (remember The Exorcist?) is parodied in the style of court music from fourteenth-century France; (3) Harle and fellow sax blower Andy Sheppard lock horns in an improvised battle over choice bits of jazz, progressive rock, and hot medieval licks; (4) multitracking his soprano sax fortyfold, Harle gallops across a pre-baroque terrain with the attitude of Axl Rose; and (5) for once, a crossover project turns out to be much greater than the sum of its parts.

No, Kenny G this ain't. What it is, as you discover after a few listens, is musicianship of the highest calibre. It's also both terrifyingly extreme and magnificently audacious - a grand tossed salad of stylistic and emotional contrasts. "Light and darkness", comments Harle in the CD booklet. "Good and evil, sacred and profane. The doublethink of the medieval mind." Harle, who is forty years old, has proved himself capable of daring contrasts. He is the most recorded classical saxophonist in the world, but he's also a force in British jazz and pop, and he composes, too.

What about Elvis? Having travelled a long way since assuring Alison that his aim is true, he teamed up in 1993 with the Brodsky Quartet to deliver The Juliet Letters, wrote some songs for Anne Sofie von Otter, and organised London's well-named genre buster, the Meltdown Festival, where he first met Harle. The sax whiz had long admired Costello's vocal directness and wasted little time in asking him to contribute to Terror and Magnificence. Costello's "performances of my songs.are born of a passion and an intensity that's hard to find," Harle writes in the booklet.

The artistic success of Terror and Magnificence can't be pinned on Costello, however, nor on Harle's co-conspirators (who include countertenor William Purefoy, soprano Sarah Leonard, the Balanescu Quartet, London Voices, and other fine musicians). Instead, the credit should go to Harle himself, who has shown that all that crossover needs to work is integrity, passion and the vision to challenge listeners - not merely to suck up (or, in this case, to blow up) to them.

Raymond Tuttle - Esquire top

John Harle is professor of saxophone and chamber music at London's Guildhall University, and his credentials as a member of the musical establishment are impeccable, but he managed to give a capacity audience in the staid mock-Tudor Ironmonger's Hall a whiff of new and dangerous worlds.

He sounds by turn louche and sleazy, wistful and romantic, and above all incredibly sexual, the apotheosis of every teenager who took up the sax because it pulled girls. He has an extraordinary ability to change his tone colour to catch a mood.

With Poulenc's Oboe Sonata he looked back with refined nostalgia to a land of lost content.

His own Matthew's Song, unwound smooth as silk. Schulhoff's sonata went from boulevard refinement to a plangent despair, intensified by pianist Richard Rodney Bennett's bleak block chords.

Bennett's own Three Piece Suite was sinuously beguiling with its smokey blend of samba and ragtime while Britten's Pan and Bartok's Rumanian Dances had an in-your-face sexual intensity that was downright dangerous.

FIONA HOOK
(Review of "Recital with Richard Rodney Bennett"
as part of the City of London Festival,
Evening Standard)

Billed as "20th-century Saxophones", this concert featured two of the instrument's most accomplished contemporary practitioners playing everything from Debussy to Dowland, Machaut to Carla Bley, Chick Corea to Charlie Chaplin.

Such genre-hopping might easily have resulted in an arch, glib, mish-mash, but the receptiveness and intelligence of saxophonists John Harle and Andy Sheppard, and their keyboard playing partner Steve Lodder, ensured that the irritatingly knowing bombast of Michael Nyman's Miserere Paraphrase aside - passed without a whiff of contrivance.

Harle began the proceedings, in a duo with Lodder, by playing Debussy's Syrinx, Ravel's Piece en forme de Habenera and the third movement of an Edison Denisov sonata, medley fashion. Although he quite rightly pointed out that the Denisov piece had recognisable stylistic affinities with the music of both Ornette Coleman and Pierre Boulez. Harle impressed not so much with his virtuosity or undoubted versatility as with the simply ravishing beauty of his tone. This was even more apparent when he and Lodder moved back to the 14th century for a soprano version of a plangent Machaut lay, then forward a couple of centuries to a pair of Dowland songs, and then up to the present for Corea's Children's Songs.

The unallowed purity of Harle's sound was tellingly emphasised when Andy Sheppard replaced him beside Lodder and bustled straight into a no-holds barred tenor version of Bley's The Lord Is Listenin' To You, Hallelujah. The breathy, preaching tone liberally embellished with fruity honks and blisteringly fast runs, brought to mind W.C Handy's description of the saxophone's sound as "moaning like a sinner on revival day". By contrast, Harle's sound on both alto and soprano might have been designed to illustrate Berlioz's contention that the instrument's "principal merit is the beautiful variety of its accent: deep and calm, passionate, dreamy, melancholic, like an echo of an echo".

The two saxophonists brought their contrasting approaches together in the concert's second half, which featured extended original compositions by both men: Sheppard's clever, lively Trapeze and Harle's richly portentous Terror and Magnificence, inspired by Machaut's poetry. Both these pieces and this fascinating concert as a whole, did not so much break down genre boundaries as demonstrate just how enjoyable the exploration of unfamiliar territory can be.

CHRIS PARKER (The Times) top

On the morning of Sunday's performance, composer John Harle was the guest on Desert Islands Discs, frightening listeners, peeling potatoes in kitchens across the country, with an excerpt from Harrison Birtwistle's opera Punch and Judy, before cooling them down again with Pentangle, The Beatles and Duke Ellington.

It was an excellent programme and it testified both to Harle's catholicity of taste and his serious thought about all sorts of things, including a darkness at the heart of English culture that he finds in Hawksmoor's Spitafields church. His new opera, Angel Magick, - with a libretto by David Pountney, commissioned by Radio 3 for performance at the Proms at the Royal Albert Hall on 21 July, - turned out to be less an examination of the heart of darkness than a moving affirmation of the humanist spirit contained in the English renaissance. And it was - perhaps surprisingly, given the complexity of the ideas involved - transfiguringly good.

Set in the home of the Elizabethan magus of Mortlake, Dr Jon Dee (you might remember him from Derek Jarman's film Jubilee), the story concerns an attempt by Dee and his jobsworth, Edward Kelley, to summon up an angel by way of secret spells. The consequent naming of the seven planets and their attendant angels provides the seven-part structure of the opera, although the form of the piece is so well-worked that it is perceived as a satisfying dramatic whole throughout.

Even the dreadful spell contained in the programme, which reads "The performance will last approximately 90 minutes with no interval", proved no impediment to enjoyment.

Played in the round, with the orchestra around one half of an astrologically detailed circle lit from below, and with the players emerging, at times disconcertingly, from all points of the compass, including the stalls, the opera was convincing as drama from first to last.

Christopher Good, whose Dr Dee was an acting rather than a singing role, was superb and he provided the clear, coherent centre around which the other, singing principals revolved.

Amplified by contact-mikes, the spoken and sung libretto (cut and pasted by Pountney largely from historical source-material researched by Ed Fenton), admirably communicated the essentials of what could have been, literally, mumbo-jumbo, into a text that remained compelling.

The music began with a heavy debt of authenticity to Dowland, then moved between the registers of Elizabethan music and a contemporary, eclectic style, carrying echoes of Birtwistle to create a convincing analogue to the music of the spheres that Dee and his circle (including Giordarno Bruno, sung brilliantly by Andrew Forbes-Lane) dreamed of.

All the principals were wonderful. Donald Maxwell as Kelley, William Purefoy as Sir Philip Sidney, Jacqueline Miura as Edmund Spencer, and - perhaps most of all - Sarah Leonard as Queen Elizabeth herself, who despite having to bear the burden of both wig, ruff and bustle, both sang like an angel (indeed, even became one) and somehow managed to retain a convincing dramatic persona.

Most of all, the music never upstaged the carefully wrought unity of the performance as a whole, suggesting that Harle has learned, after the overweening effect of his last major work, Terror and Magnificence, not to put all of his angels into one basket.

Directed by David Pountney, with set designs by Paul Bonomini and costumes by Marie-Jeanne Lecca, choreographed by Ian Spink and lit by David Cunningham, with sound design by Sound Intermedia. Angel Magik was, in the words of Sir Philip Sidney, a delight from start to finish.

The acclaimed festival remains rooted in the community but draws internationally renowned performers.

..In the same place the following day, under Swensen, they played a soprano saxophone concerto, The Imagined Sound of Sun on Stone, commissioned from Sally Beamish. The reference is to the neo-lithic Orkney tomb of Maes Howe, into which a beam of sunlight penetrates once a year on the winter solstice. Beamish's cogently constructed, exotically colourful 20-minute movement, rising to superb climaxes of pagan wildness, though not overlooking the Christian heritage of psalm and chant, was receiving its premiere - with John Harle, a soloist of barbarous splendour - on the summer solstice.

PAUL DRIVER - Sunday Times, 27th June 1997 top

...Panic (1995) was Birtwistle's contribution to a Last Night of Proms, which aroused controversy at the time. The composer called it a "dithyramb", like one of those ancient pagan odes celebrating Bacchus or Dionysus (or Pan: hence the title). It makes a hell of a lot of noise, with John Harle's exuberant alto sax honking and swooping, a drum-kit pounding away (here manned by Paul Clarvis, with more percussion in the orchestra), and the whole band trying to drown them out. It is a gleeful squib, not to be taken too seriously. Some familiar Birtwistle procedures can be heard (just) through the din; but it is surely a piece d'occasion, and the composer was probably delighted by the row it caused.

David Murray - Financial Times top

Press Reviews - Recordings UK

The five items on this disc, are excellent vehicles for Harle's virtuoso eloquence: HE DOES NOT PLAY THE SAX, HE SOARS ON IT, EACH PHRASE A WINGED AND BURNISHED THING. Lenehan is also a wonderful musician and their partnership is magically sympathetic.

Richard Rodney Bennett's Sonata, Dave Heath's Rumania, each for the soprano instrument, and Michael Berkeley's Keening, for the alto, were written for them. The first being four wistfully well-crafted movements whose third pays homage to Harold Arlen. The Heath, like the (alto) sonata by Phil Woods, is overt, enjoyable jazz. Edison Denisov's Sonata (alto sax) is a braising post-modernist riff.

“The most striking work here, by far, is Christopher Gunning’s Saxophone Concerto. A pupil of Rubbra and Richard Rodney Bennett, Gunning is best known for his music for the TV Poirot series... He tells us: ‘One summer eveing as I ambled across Hungerford Bridge I heard a saxophone mingling with other city sounds.’ This rich evocation is caught remarkably effectively at the opening... It is a haunting work, ending as magnetically as it opens...”

“Christopher Gunning has written some outstanding music for film and television. He is, in my opinion, one of the UK's strongest cards and it is well past time that he was snapped up by the major studios for grand symphonic scores. His Saxophone Concerto is in a single continuous movement lasting almost twenty minutes. It starts in wisps and elegies rising through allusions to The Lark Ascending via moments that had me thinking of Copland's score for The Tender Land.

And he has chosen to evoke the different types of character in the work with different modes of music; jazz creeps in for fairies - the stabbing strings of 'The State of Affairs' are supplanted by music which reminds you that Costello's father, Ross McManus, toured with the Joe Loss Orchestra, and later in 'Oberon and Titania' John Harle and Chris Laurence are used to great effect on saxophone and double bass.

The movement opens with screeching, distorted violins, and then abruptly body slams the listener into a beautiful, delicate, poised motif in a lilting compound meter with oboe, soprano sax and clarinet playing catch with the melody. About two minutes into the movement Costello changes step again and drop kicks the listener into a jazzy, Leonard Bernstein-ish variation of the original motif with world-renowned classical saxophonist John Harle doing his thing on soprano sax alongside jazz drummer Peter Erskine.

Commissioned by Italy's Aterbelletto dance company, performed by the London Symphony Orchestra, and conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas, Il Sogno marks Costello's first attempt at a full-length orchestral piece. Intended to accompany a ballet adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream, it patches together a little Debussy, a little Aaron Copland, and a lot of George Gershwin. Saxophonist John Harle cuts loose on some solos to bring out the jazz, and it all sounds pleasant enough to not offend, as well as inventive enough to confirm Costello as more than a dabbler.

John Harle's keening saxophone crowns the National Youth Choir's sublime, fervent singing. Recommended.

For the Alto Sax, there's Edison Denisov's astonishingly eclectic Sonata, Michael Berkeley's angry elegy, 'Keening', and Phil Woods' Sonata, so convincingly jazzy that it's impossible to tell if the players are actually improvising.

For the Soprano, there's dave Heath's 'Rumania', in which modern jazz invades Central Europe, and Richard Rodney Bennett's urbane Sonata, with its touching memorial tribute to Harold Arlen.

John Harle's range of styles, expression, and sheer volume is quite remarkable, and he's matched all the way by John Lenehan.

Both John Harle, in our decade, and Marcel Mule, in the 1930s and 1940s, brought the saxophone forward to the footlights of the classical stage in their own way. Harle's latest album, as composer and performer, takes its name from the central "fantasy", Terror and Magnificence, an exploration of the double-think of the medieval mind in a 20-minute setting of words by Guillaume de Machaut, for instrumental soloists, the London Voices - and 40 soprano saxophones (all played by Harle).

This imaginative, but somewhat shapeless, tableau is balanced by the tighter Rosie-Blood, written by Harle for the 1995 Meltdown Festival and clothing the bones of 12th-Century polyphony by Perotin in the gaudy of male chorus, counter-tenor (William Purefoy) and multi-tracked sax. Elvis Costello sings Harle's Mistress Mine (four songs from Twelfth Night), and three haunting settings of Tudor lyrics, Three Ravens, are sung by Sarah Leonard.

Hilary Finch, The Times 26 September 1996

This is an excellent showcase for Beamish (b.1956). Islington-bred, as her note on The Caledonian Road explains, she began her career as a viola player, but duly followed that northern-leading road to Scotland and life as a composer. Landscapes north of the border have vitally influenced her output. The Caledonian Road, a vivid invention for chamber orchestra, is inspired by the ruins of St Andrew's Cathedral. The Day Dawn transforms a Shetland fiddle tune associated with the winter solstice into a haunting string-orchestral piece. The soprano-saxophone concerto, The Imagined Sound of Sun on Stone, a work of wild splendour, especially as interpreted by Harle, must be Beamish's most original statement so far.

Paul Driver, The Sunday Times, 28 January 2001

The title work more than compensates though, Beamish has a brilliant talent with brass instruments - there are some brilliant phrases where Harle allows the reed to go slack, making for an avant-garde jazz feel, reminiscent of the late 1960's, while the strings and wind slide around him, making this a truly varied and enjoyable amalgam. Recommended.

Audiostreet, 2 May 2001

Darling of jazz, film scores and 'easy listening', the saxophone harbours far greater expressive potential than many 'serious' composers give it credit for. And when an artist of John Harle's calibre makes play with a work such as Stanley Myer's engaging Concerto for soprano saxophone (that wistful tone is unmistakable), one wonders that so few composers have exploited the medium. Myers died in November 1993 and this album is dedicated to his memory. His concerto combines the flamboyance of a Malcolm Arnold with a harmonic richness and flair for melody that recall the creative heyday of Sir William Walton. The tunes themselves are attractive, the method of their employment, fairly animated (alternate fast and slow sections make for plenty of varied incident) and Myer's orchestration has a scenic aspect that approximates quality film music.

Similar claims might be made on behalf of Richard Rodney Bennett's Concerto for Stan Getz which, like the Myers work, incorporates a demanding cadenza and a particularly lovely slow movement - one that could easily achieve 'theme tune' status. Being something of a musical polymath, Bennett is equally at home in any number of styles and genres, which of course facilitates easy travel between jazz or 'concert' music and back again. "The language of Concerto for Stan Getz arises out of a true cross-fertilisation of ideas ." writes Susan Bradshaw, and Harle's tenor saxophone dominates a colourful array of catchy, clear-headed and well-formed arguments. The jazz element (or, to be more specific, the Getz element) is a strong feature of the score, whereas Michael Torke's quasi-minimalist Saxophone Concerto although typical of a by now fairly familiar voice recalls the Steve Reich of Variations for wind, strings and keyboards. Again, the music is disarmingly unaffected, with economical scoring and a finely honed style of thematic development.

Gramophone, July 1995

John Harle's latest release, called Saxophone Concertos, is a magnificent undertaking. In one CD John Harle takes the listener through the brief but astonishing history of the saxophone concerto. To cover the amount of literature contained on this disc is an enormous task. John Harle has met and mastered this musical task, with a little help from his friends Sir Neville Marriner and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields. Before you listen to this CD, prepare yourself for the evening. Turn on the telephone answering machine and be prepared to spend seventy gorgeous minutes with John Harle and the Saxophone Concertos.

John Harle has a warm smooth sound that is very appealing. His vibrato is varied from none to much, as the music calls for this nuance. His fingers are fast and clean, as is his articulation. He is a sensitive performer who can easily bend a phrase to fit his artistic plan. In many of the selections, John subtly understates the lines and brings out a seething boil just below the surface of the music. We are carried along on this boiling excitement through the entire CD. The intensity of both the soloist and the orchestra never lets up and we are left a most exciting performance.

Debussy's Rapsodie for Alto Saxophone and Orchestra has been reorchestrated into a more complex musical experience. It is an exciting edition which contributes to this being an even more interesting piece of music. Ibert's Concertino has a full vibrant alto sound as Harle immediately captures the mood of the music. His sensitivity is displayed in the phrasing and his articulation is clean and precise. Harle's altissimo register is clean and precise. Harle shifts beautifully from movement to movement with a very impressive ending cadenza.

Fantasia for Soprano Saxophone and Chamber Orchestra, by Heitor Villa-Lobos, is a charming piece that isn't heard often enough. For those who don't remember, Fantasia was originally composed for Marcel Mule, who, ironically, never got the chance to record it. It could be difficult for the soloist to make sense out of the piece until all the parts are performed, but with this group the result is not just making sense, but great music.

The Glazunov Concerto appears here and there is magic in Harle's performance. A new piece to us is the Concerto for Alto Saxohone and Orchestra by Richard Rodney Bennett. The writing is extremely well done and especially nice for the saxophone. The piece is modern sounding, with the prevailing logic of well-defined tonal center. Throughout this Concerto the composer shows off the saxophone's many tonal faces in their best light.

Saxophone Journal, USA

Harle and soul

Yes, Elvis Costello and Andy sheppard are stronger household names, but when it comes to Terror and Magnificence, the latest CD on which they feature, it's undeniably the other saxophonist John Harle who's the real instigator and inspirer.

Harle has composed some nineties-style settings of medieval songs, which, typically, defy categorisation. If you want a taste of their mesmerising mixings, then head for the Royal Festival Hall this Saturday. It's the launch cocnert of their CD in London, as part of the oris London Jazz Festival.

My interview with Harle had to be done via mobile phone betwixt tour venues - characteristic of a busy man with fingers in many pieces. Not only does his CV boast that he is the most recorded classical saxophonist in the world, he's a professor at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, he's written more than 30 works for film or TV and over 20 for the concert platform. Past musical partners include Moondog and Paul McCartney, the London Symphony Orchestra, English Chamber Orchestra and the San Diego Symphony.

Popular, upbeat composers such as Gavin Bryars, Michael Nyman and Mike Westbrook nudge alongside heavyweights such as Berio and Birtwistle in the list of composers who have written specifically for him.

With a past as diverse as his, it was difficult to know what to expect from Terror and Magnificence.

"The album is the bringing together of four or five projects that happened in 1995, most of which were quite coincidentally related to settings of ancient or old words," explains Harle.

Mistress mine, sung on disc by Costello, was initially commissioned for David Pountney's production of Twelfth Night for the Nottingham Playhouse in spring 1995.

"It was the first Shakespeare play that I'd set and a bit of a learning experience. These songs are written for Feste who has a critical perspective on the inadequacies and foibles of the characters. I've set them more in the tragic comic mode than in the traditional jester mode. David's production was in contemporary dress and set on an island that could have been a Club Med island, but it was mystical."

This idea of mysterious, medieval sounds emerging within a contemporary context is at the very heart of Harle's music. His settings of 14th century texts or musical fragments by Frenchmen Machaut, Pérotin or anonymous Englishmen have an ancient magic about them, yet they are surrounded by saxophones, synthesiser samples, soaring vocals, percussion or mini orchestras. You are transported into the various worlds of today's TV, pop, film, jazz or dance clubs. It's not pastiche; Harle has chosen his musicians carefully.

Elvis Costello, pop icon with a penchant for classical forays, was the only voice he considered when transferring Mistress Mine from stage to disc: "I don't know another example of classical crossover that could work as successfully as his." Costello's colloquialisms remain.

"I've attempted to capture every single nuance and colour change of texture and lay it there flat on the record. Around him the musical picture is quite a contemporary one."

The Three Ravens is given a similar treatment. "We needed a classical voice with a lot of the affectations of the classical style stripped away from it," says Harle. Sarah Leonard performs olde-English-style ballads with a choir-boy purity, but her accompanying landscape features trilling piccolos, shunting strings and jazzy piano chords.

Much of Harle's obsession with the Renaissance stems, rather defiantly, from people's attitude to his instrument. "As a saxophonist on is always being told that your instrument was invented in the 1840s, therefore you could have no possible interest in anything prior to that. I only partially believe that Adolphe Sax invented the saxophone. He definitely invented the modern saxophone as we know it, but the idea of conically bored brass instruments with reeds existed in ancient Egypt, so I don't have a difficulty going back to earlier periods."

It's the ritualistic elements and doublethink of the medieval mind, hence the name of the title piece - Terror and Magnificence - that intrigues him.

"I was very into Machaut at the time of writing music for a film (for BBC's The Score) on Spitalfields church, which is designed by Hawksmoor. The sense of the text seemed to mirror a lot of the things I thought about the church ; the light and the dark involved in its construction."

His soundscapes evoke good and evil, life and death, agony and ecstasy. Harle utilises the text to literal levels, with Thomas Russell's sexy voice booming out, "Un, deux, troi, quatre .. Cantus, estampie, hocket, countertenor" to appropriate musical examples. The work is a curious collage welcoming the talents of Paul Clarvis on ethnic percussion, Steve Lodder producing keyboard samples and Andy Sheppard stepping up the saxophone takes.

Casting old mystics aside, Harle doesnÕt feel a musical affinity with composers whom he has worked with, but "in terms of spirit and inspiration as opposed to practicality, I feel closer to Birtwistle than anyone else, even though my music doesn't sound like his aural world".

He admits his style is more "crossover", but it's serious: "in crossover music if you don't create something new out of the different threads that make up the various talents on the record, then it fails as an artistic project even though it may still be a commercial one." With the album Terror and Magnificence, Harle may have succeeded on both fronts.

Kate Sherriff, The Independent, November 1996

One of the projects I've worked on recently is Terror and Magnificence with the saxophonist John Harle. It's a mixture of Harle's multi-tracked saxophone, a six-voice male chorus with Sarah Leonard (soprano), William Purefoy (counter-tenor) and my vocals. I've always been a great admirer of Harle, particularly his tribute to Duke Ellington, In the Shadow of the Duke, and I asked him if he would like to perform in Meltdown. It was the first time we'd met and when we were backstage he asked me if I'd like to get involved in this project.

I don't think that I have a more beautiful voice than classical singers but I may have a more affecting one for certain kinds of music. John felt there were possibilities in the sound of my voice - perhaps connecting with words in a more direct way than classical singers.

Elvis Costello in Classic FM Magazine, 9 November 1996

The enthusiasm with which contemporary composers have taken up the challenge of writing for early instruments has not always been evident in the result. In the case of John Tavener's Total Eclipse and Agraphon, however, written for the Academy of Ancient Music and coupled on this disc of striking and often beautiful music, the confrontation of new ideas - or perhaps new-and-old ideas - with pre-Classical ways of playing forms a fascinating conjunction.

In Total Eclipse, set in potent relation to John Harle's fierce saxophone (he represents Saul: the 'eclipse' is his blindness; the 'metanoia', as chanted by the choir, his conversion) these seasoned performers evoke new aspects of Tavener's music, taking further the discoveries of Eternity's Sunrise, his earlier collaboration with the ensemble, to recreate one of the composer's most terse and original scores of recent years.

Nicholas Williams, BBC Music Magazine top

"O tempora! O mores! When I was still studying with Tavener, in the mid-1980s, I had discussions with an eminent period-instrument conductor concerning the possibilities of new music for Baroque instruments. In spite of his personal enthusiasm for such projects, the funding bodies and promoters of the time would have nothing to do with the idea. Now we have Total Eclipse: the second collaboration between Sir John Tavener and the Academy of Ancient Music, released on a highly respected international label. If that's not progress, I don't know what is! Total Eclipse deals with the conversion of St Paul, Tavener responding to the typically terse libretto by Mother Thekla with music of graphic intensity. He begins with weird shriekings from John Harle's saxophone which are transformed into a set of minimalistic chord sequences with saxophone arpeggios, oddly suggesting no other music so much as that of Philip Glass in the first section, 'Stavromenos' (the Greek is misspelt in the booklet, incidentally). Further into the work there is not only some beautiful playing from John Harle, but also from Frank de Bruine, who makes the Baroque oboe positively shine."

International Record Review top

"The recording can only hint at the spatial effects that Tavener envisaged, but it has nevertheless been exceptionally well committed to disc. Paul Goodwin and his team have no problems coping with Tavener's demands, and John Harle's stunning account of the solo saxophone part, together with Christopher Robson's and James Gilchrist's vocal contributions, make this extraordinary work a must for all Tavener fans."

Michael Stewart, Gramophone top

"Total Eclipse was inspired by the story of the conversion of St Paul, and employs ancient and modern instruments together: Baroque oboe, Tibetan temple bowl and tam-tam stand for Christ, while opposing them the soprano saxophone and a countertenor represent St Paul. Paul Goodwin is delighted with the results. 'The way Tavener has used the Baroque oboe with the saxophone is brilliant - there's an aspect of their sound that is very similar, although they have extremely different backgrounds. A saxophone can be more acerbic and aggressive, but when you hear it answered by a Baroque oboe, there are the same elements there but sweetened.'

The wide range of moods available to the saxophone - played on the recording by John Harle - is an essential feature of Total Eclipse. 'The saxophone represents Paul in his different stages,' says Tavener. 'John Harle could play Dowland and also make the most raucous sounds possible, while the Baroque oboe had the kind of gentle sound I wanted for Christ. The way the saxophonist played gave me the idea of showing the wild, murderous, debauched Paul turning into Christ.'

John Harle has played extensively with the period instrument group Fretwork, and is no stranger to the collision of old and new instruments. 'There was a sense in Total Eclipse of the soprano sax coming home to a world of ritual,' he says. 'Of all the saxophone family, the soprano is nearest to early Egyptian single-reed instruments. It's quite close to a folk instrument. It felt like it had ancient roots. For the role of Saul one had to expand the expressive range of the instrument as widely as possible, going to extremes of loudness and coarseness and of serenity, peace and sensuousness. I've never in my life played louder than in the opening of Total Eclipse. Tavener encouraged me to play more wildly than I ever thought I could. But it was all within the frame of the piece.'

Christopher Wood BBC Music Magazine top

John Harle is our most ebullient and, wide-ranging saxophonist as well as doubtless our best. On these two CDs, he exhibits his inventive approach to widening the saxophone repertoire. The Songbook comprises 14 melodic items - Dowland and Machaut songs. Rachmaninov's Vocalise, Debussy's Syrinx for solo flute, and more recent pieces by Michael Nyman, Stanley Myers and Chick Corea - requisitioned, as it were, by Harle for use on his own quasi-vocal instrument, to hauntingly eloquent effect. Keyboard accompaniments are supplied where necessary by John Lenehan. Soprano Sarah Leonard contributes an actual vocal line in Nyman's Ariel Songs; and the disc ends with a Birtwistle rarity, Dinah's and Nick's Love Song, (1970), a serene ritual for harp and three melody instruments - saxophones, of course - not previously recorded. Sax Drive contains recent concertos by Stanley Myers, Richard Rodney Bennett and Michael Torke's Saxophone Concerto. Bennett's Concerto for Stan Getz is the one that sticks with me, particularly its "Elegy" middle movement, in which modern classical technique, light music and the lyrical expansiveness of jazz are perfectly fused. Harle's musicianship is never more seductive than here.

Paul Driver, Sunday Times top

Ingolf Dahl - Concerto for Alto Saxophone, New World Symphony/ Tilson Thomas
Argo 444 459-2

The earlier concerto by the German-born American Ingolf Dahl (1912-70) shows the neo-classical influence of the Stravinsky of Oedipus Rex. Dahl was in fact Stravinsky's assistant for some years, and elements of his language, as well as Hindemith's and Copland's, provide such character as his workmanlike but indigestible pieces possess. Static yet efficient performances under ex-Dahl pupil Tilson Thomas, while Harle is again the complete saxophonist.

George Hall, BBC Music Magazine top

Myers/ Bennett/ Torke - Concerti - Argo SO/ Judd, BBC Concert Orchestra/ Wordsworth, Albany SO/ Alan Miller
Argo 443 529-2

A virtuoso and a sensitive musician (the two don’t always coincide), John Harle has extended the 'classical' saxophone repertoire enormously. All three concertos on the Sax Drive collection prove worthwhile. Richard Rodney Bennett's 1990 piece was intended for jazz saxophonist Stan Getz to use as crossover material into classical territory, and with its film noir overtones and blues-in-the-night slow movement conjoins distinct styles in a creative manner. The late Stanley Myers was best-known for his film and TV scores, but he too relished the challenge of concert music, producing an eclectic piece that has enough identity of its own to make a definite impact.

Minimalism of a state-of-the-art kind motivates much of Torke's piece, though how poorly its processes survive in slow tempo conditions is clear from the second movement.

George Hall, BBC Music Magazine top

Mistress Mine (1994); Terror and Magnificence (1995); The Three Ravens (1995); Perotin/Harle: Rosie-Blood - Sederant (1995)

John Harle, Andy Sheppard (saxophones); Elvis Costello (vocal); Sarah Leonard (soprano); William Purefoy (counter-tenor); Steve Lodder (keyboards); Paul Clarvis (percussion); Thomas Russell (speaker); John Harle Band; Balenescu Quartet; London Voices/Terry Edwards

Given the kerfuffle over the omission of Marianne Faithfull's "Twentieth Century Blues" from the classical charts, this could give the pigeonholers apoplexy. Aided by jazz musicians and a rock singer, Harle draws on sources from medieval ars nova to contemporary improv. However you slice it, it's stimulating stuff.

Settings of Shakespeare's songs tend to be either fakely folksy or fifth-rate Shaftesbury Avenue. Harle's sound like purely modern quality pop. Closer examination reveals traditional bones and sinews in the melodies. Costello is superb - intense and emotionally affecting - on three songs from Twelfth Night. Most classical singers, despite technically "better" voices, should study these performances as object-lessons in interpretation.

Harle has been well-served by all the vocal soloists. Sarah Leonard's renderings of anonymous ballads on Three Ravens tap into the fundamentals of love, death and fate, while on Sederunt, William Purefoy properly honours a crucial pioneer, Perotin.

Terror and Magnificence raises fascinating and controversial questions about categorisation, influences, correspondences and resonances, breaching normally well-policed frontiers between genres. One could consider, for example, Clarvis's ethnic patterns come from Morocco via Nyman's Upside Down Violin, from medieval Moorish cross-fertilisations, or from Ambient/Dance sources.

Barry Witherden - Classic CD Magazine top

Catherine Bott, Sarah Leonard, Nicole Tibbels (sops);
New Brighton School Choir, Wirral;
Worcester Cathedral Choir; Silencium Ensemble; Academy
Of St Martin in the Fields; John Harle (Sax)

Perhaps the most telling observation to be made about this release is the way that Argo have chosen to package it. The front cover does not see fit to name the composer John Harle but is simply entitled "Silencium: Songs of the Spirit" like a compilation aimed at the New Age market. The trusty Argo logo which has prowled the label's front covers like a subversive gun sight for years now is also missing, an indication too of the album's 'crossover' potential.

The very clarity of the album's marketing profile makes me hesitate to review it in this journal, because we probably aren't its intended target audience. Several of its tracks started life as themes for television series, a feature film and a Nissan television commercial. It is therefore probably no surprise that the comparisons that immediately spring to mind are the famous British Airways ad, at least when Sarah Leonard is overdubbed in thirds, as in Spiritu and Light, an the theme tune to one of my favourite P. D. James murder mysteries when the solo viola starts up in the album's title track.

Singing is a prominent feature of the album and there is much to admire in the contributions of the three sopranos - Catherine Bott, Sarah Leonard and Nicole Tibbels. They produce a wealth of nuance and colour out of the material they have been given, even when it seems at times to be placed in an uncomfortably high tessitura. Catherine Bott's beautiful solo in The Family of Love is particularly extraordinary for the way that she manages to conjure up the sound of a boy treble. John Harle has produced this album himself, permeating it with an atmosphere of hushed calm, set in motion only by the light rustle of Paul Clarvis's world percussion and what the booklet terms "other bitty bits".

MARTYN HARRY - Gramophone Magazine

John Harle (saxophone)/John Lenehan (harpsichord, piano)/Sarah Leonard (soprano).

Singers sometimes venture into the wordless, quasi-instrumental genre of the vocalise, so why shouldn't an instrumentalist tackle some songs without their words?

Highlights are Harle's haunting tone in Myer's Voyager, and the melancholy airs by Elizabethan songwriter John Dowland, which find in the late-night loneliness of sax a strangely congenial voice. Her accompanist John Lenehan takes to the harpsichord, creating a piquant combination. Very Peter Greenaway.

GEORGE HALL - BBC Music Magazine

Maxwell Davies: 'Sister Jeanne's Vision' from the film The Devils (Aquarius/Nicholas Cleobury)

Birtwistle: Punch and Judy (Stephen Roberts baritone/London Sinfonietta/David Atherton)

Nyman: 'Miserere' from the film The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (London Voices/Michael Nyman Band/Michael Nyman)

John Harle: soundtrack from the television series. Dominic Burnham/Elvis Costello/Emma Kirkby/Sarah Leonard/Lucie Skeaping/Willard White

Simon Schama's television series A History of Britain paused for a breath at the end of last year, no doubt leaving audiences eager for more of its immediately accessible telling of how cabbages, kings and canny politicians helped shape the national identity. Schama's informal tone is echoed in John Harle's soundtrack, which blends fragments of ancient chant, medieval lyrics and folksong into an eclectic mix of musical styles. Traces of the Hilliard Ensemble-Garbarek partnership percolate Harle's musical landscape, nakedly so in the Officium-style Miserere. Shakespeare and Elvis Costello may not be obvious companions, although the soulful rock singer memorably underlines the melancholy of Come Away Death, aided by the keening counterpoint of Harle's saxophone. Emma Kirkby, Willard White, Sarah Leonard, Lucie Skeaping and boy treble Dominic Burnham add to the range of vocal colours here, which remain sufficiently bold and imaginative to exceed by far the usual expectations of a TV soundtrack.

Andrew Stewart - Classic FM Magazine

Sally Beamish
The Imagined Sound of Sun on Stone; The Caledonian Road; The Day Down; No' I'm Not Afraid
John Harle (saxophone); Swedish Chamber Orch./Rudner (BIS CD 1161)

...The Imagined Sound is a saxophone concerto, a hymn to celebrate the end of winter. John Harle plays it with his customary virtuosity. The music builds to an impressive climax, which suggests that Beamish is equipped to tackle the biggest forms such as symphony. She is not afraid of emotions and her command of tone-colour enables her to express them vividly.

The Sunday Telegraph, 28th January 2001

...And finally there's the saxophone concerto The Imagined Sound of Sun on Stone (1999), whose starting point is a Swedish herding call - used as kind of ritornello - but which is drenched in a plethora of references primeval, religious, mystical and contemporary, music at once hard and soft edged. Fine playing from the soloist, John Harle, in this work and throughout the disc by the Swedish Chamber Orchestra under Ola Rudner.

Stephen Pettitt - BBC Music Magazine

Reviews continued...

Reviews - UK

Press Quotes Concert Performances UK