Congratulations to Musica Viva Australia for delivering an exuberant program of saxophones and voice with Hollywood Songbook impeccably performed by the Signum Saxophone Quartet and soprano Ali McGregor. The Signum saxophonists — Blaž Kemperle, Jacopo Taddei, Alan Lužar and David Brand — are a formidable ensemble: faultless timing, fascinating colour changes and they were very creatively lit on the stage. Four saxophones can make a lot of sound and that they did. It was fortunate soprano Ali McGregor can hold her own across a variety of styles.
The program centred around three haunting songs from Hans Eisler’s Hollywood Songbook, written in California during his exile from Nazi Germany. The title Hollywood Songbook belies the anguish they depict; Berthold Brecht wrote most of the lyrics for this collection. Eisler and Brecht fled Germany where their radical left-wing activities put their lives at risk, and they ended up in Hollywood with many other exiled artists.
Although this concert was centred around these bitter texts, most of the programmed works seemed to be there by some loose association of being written by Europeans in America (such as Kurt Weill) or just happened to be musical numbers that had their day in Hollywood (via Broadway). While the repertoire was curious, the performances were stupendous, maybe relentlessly so.
If there is one quibble, it is the over-reliance on the arrangements of songs by Izidor Leitinger. In all but the Eisler songs Leitinger’s arrangements had the sax quartet busily displaying a turbulent virtuosity, generally leaving McGregor harmonically abandoned, but she more than rose to the challenge. The arrangements tended toward Astor Piazzolla, more tango than Weimar jazz style — great to showcase the saxophones, but perhaps a little off the mark for Broadway material.
While Signum Saxophone Quartet dazzled, they just played most things too fast, especially with the dance selections from Bernstein’s On The Town, Copland’s Rodeo and Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet. The feeling of dance was surrendered to the virtuosity (and velocity) of the players.
Ali McGregor gave a full-voiced delivery of songs by Cole Porter, Irving Berlin and Friedrich Hollander. McGregor moved effortlessly from cabaret to Broadway and ended one song on a stratospheric high note that must surely have been in her whistle register. She doesn’t sing with the nasal twang that is favoured on Broadway now, more Mary Martin than Barbara Cook.
The two most successful works were the three Eisler songs and three movements from Five Pieces for String Quartet by Czech composer Erwin Schulhoff. The arrangements for accompanying the Eisler songs To the Little Radio, Die Landschaft des Exils (The Landscape of Exile) and The Homecoming were all subdued, respecting Eisler’s own minimal approach. These are not Broadway tunes; the vocal line is extremely angular and demanding. Ali McGregor had total command of the songs, delivering a memorably heart-wrenching experience.
Erwin Schulhoff never made it to Hollywood; he died in a concentration camp. His Five Pieces for String Quartet uses four stringed instruments playing lots of double stops and extended techniques. Compared to the original string version, the saxophone arrangement sounded a bit hollowed out, but it was a cracker of a performance, nevertheless.
The whole concert began with an effective acknowledgement of country, spoken by Ali McGregor to muted drones from the saxes, suggesting, but not co-opting a First Nations feel. This morphed into Ali McGregor singing a few phrases of the traditional folksong I Am a Poor Wayfaring Stranger. More of this thoughtful mood would have been welcome in the concert.
The concert ended with Harold Arlen’s Somewhere Over the Rainbow, again with an arrangement for the saxophones that left Ali McGregor in harmonic limbo, and then an encore of the Gershwin’s The Man I Love. This was Ali McGregor’s moment.
However, this was the Signum Saxophone Quartet and soprano Ali McGregor. Breath-taking, virtuosic sax playing was delivered in concert with a soprano at her stylistic and technical peak. All quibbles were easily brushed aside in the excitement of it all.
Photo credit: Peter Hislop
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Nick Tolhurst reviewed “Hollywood Songbook”, presented by Musica Viva Australia at the Melbourne Recital Centre, Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, on Tuesday May 6, 2025.
