Ulfert Smidt & Jackson Crawford: Fireworks of Music

Dazzling colours, sparky rhythms, and invigorating sounds: fireworks from the CD-player need not always be by Handel – they can, in fact, have great contemporary value with music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The present recording brings the New Year’s Eve concert of 2013 performed by the internationally renowned saxophonist Jackson Crawford and the virtuoso concert organist Ulfert Smidt (here seated at ‘his’ organ at the Marktkirche Hannover) to your living room. This album is by no means jazzy, for Crawford plays the saxophone in as classical a manner as it was once invented by Adolphe Sax and introduced to the symphony orchestra by Berlioz, Ravel, and Strauss. Together, both musicians perform inspiring arrangements of favourites such as Schumann’s ‘Abendlied’ or Rachmaninov’s ‘Vocalise’. Shostakovich’s ‘Second Waltz’ from the Suite for variety orchestra adds the esprit so characteristic of New Year’s Eve. Moreover, a disc like this one really could not do without organ fireworks at the turn of the year: two movements from Charles-Marie Widor’s Symphony no. 5 – including, of course, the ‘Toccata’ – and Edwin Lemare’s radiant transcription of Edward Elgar’s ‘Pomp & Circumstance no. 1’.

At the Marktkirche Hannover, both instruments come together not only acoustically but even look like musical siblings. The organ casing designed by Dieter Oesterlen is the architectural icon of German organ building during the time of the so-called Wirtschaftswunder, and it is adequately mirrored by the elegance of the sensuously curvaceous corpus of the alto saxophone.

Ulfert Smidt
Jackson Crawford