2025
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Saxophone Concerto
Adolphus Hailstork
“This Project Encore Vol. 1 album is packed with inventive and outstandingly crisp tracks that feel lush and full-bodied, and the players both put their heart and passion into the performances each and every time…it’s all quite breathtaking and on point all the time.”
“The pieces performed by McAllister, in tandem with the talented pianist Liz Ames, stand out for their melodic inventiveness and liveliness and rhythmic intensity. In most cases, the authors summoned here draw liberally from extra-cultured music - jazz primarily, but also funk, rock and even Balkan music -, mixing classical, contemporary and vernacular languages with imagination and consistency…a beautiful and exhilarating CD.”
“[John] Adams wrote the concerto for saxophone virtuoso Tim McAllister, who played it Friday with consummate polish and verve”
“one that will be studied and admired by saxophonists everywhere, yet deserves a still wider audience…remarkably good and thought provoking.”
“Soloist Timothy McAllister proved brilliantly up to the enormous demands — vast spreads of pitches, disjunct lines that wanted to be as lyrical as possible and some dazzling scurries.”
[Review: “John Adams Saxophone Concerto is a Hit”]
“Adams’s new Saxophone Concerto, with its dedicatee Timothy McAllister as the soloist, was fascinating. Adams grew up listening to bebop, and that idiom shone exhilaratingly through, but there were also echoes of Stravinsky and Bernstein. The intricate inventiveness of the solo line was subtly shadowed by bassoon, flute, and the saxophone’s clarinet cousin: Marin Alsop and the BBC Symphony Orchestra did it proud.”
[REVIEW: “The RLPO presents ‘Sax in the City’”] “This being an evening dedicated to the unsung sax, its foremost classical exponent, Timothy McAllister, had made the journey from the US to reprise his performance of John Adams’ new Saxophone Concerto…the work is jazz-infused, the spiralling solos giving McAllister the chance to showcase a wonderful musical agility…”