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Here's one tor the Guinness Book of Records. Last year, saxophonist John Harle played to the biggest ever audience for the premiere of a musical work. His performance of Panic, a bracing saxophone concerto by Harrison Birtwistle, at the last night of the 1995 Proms was seen and heard in 16 countries around the world. it turned the most unlikely individuals, from Lord Tebbit to Anne Robinson, into music critics. Who, they wanted to know, was responsible for this filthy racket?
Early-music purists may be upset by Harle's latest venture, an exploration of medieval and Tudor themes. but no one could call it a filthy racket. Terror And Magnificence, which opened a brief British tour at the Aberdeen Festival last night and is out on CD, is a programme of linked pieces featuring the voices of Elvis Costello, soprano Sarah Leonard and counter-tenor William Purefoy, Harle and Andy Sheppard on saxophones, the Balanescu Quartet and others. The music ranges from settings of Shakespeare songs, sung by Costello, to a quite unearthly passage for 40 multi-tracked soprano saxophones.
The saxophone, says Harle, is an instrument paradoxically well suited to the exploration of ancient music.
"I'm always being told that my instrument is very young, but instruments rather like it have existed for centuries. The British Museum has some dating back to ancient Egypt. If you try playing the baroque or classical or romantic repertoire on the saxophone it doesn't really fit, but go back to the fourteenth century and it sounds perfectly at home. We don't actually know how music sounded then, anyway."
One feature of the saxophone is the similarity of its sound to the human voice. This can be quite eerie, as in the case of the late Johnny Hodges, alto saxophone star of Duke Ellington's orchestra. Hodges, with his unique, floating tone, was one of Harle's first heroes, and inspired in him a fascination with what he calls "the demimonde between instrumental and vocal music."
There are moments here when Harle's sound seems, like Hodges's, to have no earthbound properties at all. This may be why it sounds so right in the context, suggesting a dreamlike state in which past and present are constantly fading into one another. The same is true of Costello's contribution, three songs from Twelfth Night. Surrounded by far-off, airy sounds, his voice whispers close to your ear, intense and intimate. As a trick of aural perspective this is quite unsettling, but there is more to it than that.
"His voice comes from deep inside his personality," says Harle. "Every single thought that goes through his head is there in his voice."
In settings of three pieces from Chappell's Popular Music of The Olden Time, Leonard brings off the remarkable feat of giving a guileless, almost childishly innocent performance of simple folksongs, while suggesting that something nameless and nasty is just out of sight. Purefoy's voice, on the other hand, is exactly as you would expect an angel to sound.
The title Terror And Magnificence derives from Harle's long fascination with the medieval world and its extreme contracts — sacred and profane, light and dark — and also with ritual, ceremony and magic. But it is not necessary to share his preoccupations to be bowled over by the variety, energy and sheer size of the music. To reproduce the full effect live has, proved hugely complicated, requiring a much extended sound system and an intricate series of prepared tapes. Elaborate production is no guarantee of quality, but here, the work merits every ounce of the effort put into it.
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