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Heard Again for the First Time

A LEGACY OF MUSIC LOST, FORGOTTEN, AND OF OUR TIME

Paul Cohen saxophone

Ingolf Dahl composer
Marguerite Roesgen-Champion composer
Charles Martin Loeffler composer
Steve Cohen composer

Release Date: September 10, 2021
Catalog #: RR8057
Format: Digital & Physical
20th Century
Chamber
Flute
Harpsichord
Saxophone

From compelling solo interpretations to dramatic instrumental flourishes, saxophonist Paul Cohen revives original works for saxophone that were lost or unknown for decades. On HEARD AGAIN FOR THE FIRST TIME, Cohen is joined by the Eastern Wind Symphony under Todd Nichols and an impressive roster of soloists who breathe fresh life into this centuries-spanning collection.

The album, with the majestic and expansive original 1949 version of Dahl’s Concerto for Alto Saxophone, long-lost manuscripts of works by Loeffler, Roesgen-Champion’s mid-century impressionism, and Steve Cohen’s contemporary Trio not only reveals a previously unknown depth of saxophone repertoire, but nobly illustrates the saxophone’s role in a multitude of musical styles.

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Track Listing & Credits

# Title Composer Performer
01 Concerto for Alto Saxophone & Wind Ensemble: I. Recitative - Adagio Ingolf Dahl Eastern Wind Symphony | Todd Nichols, conductor; Paul Cohen, alto saxophone 16:41
02 Concerto for Alto Saxophone & Wind Ensemble: II. Rondo Ingolf Dahl Eastern Wind Symphony | Todd Nichols, conductor; Paul Cohen, alto saxophone 10:31
03 Concerto No. 2: I. Prelude Marguerite Roesgen-Champion Paul Cohen, alto saxophone; Roger Nye, bassoon; Rebecca Cypess, harpsichord 2:16
04 Concerto No. 2: II. Allegro moderato Marguerite Roesgen-Champion Paul Cohen, alto saxophone; Roger Nye, bassoon; Rebecca Cypess, harpsichord 4:29
05 Concerto No. 2: III. Intermede Marguerite Roesgen-Champion Paul Cohen, alto saxophone; Roger Nye, bassoon; Rebecca Cypess, harpsichord 1:19
06 Concerto No. 2: IV. Final Marguerite Roesgen-Champion Paul Cohen, alto saxophone; Roger Nye, bassoon; Rebecca Cypess, harpsichord 3:17
07 Ballade carnavalesque Charles Martin Loeffler Kathleen Nester, flute; Lynne Cohen, oboe; Paul Cohen, alto saxophone; Roger Nye, bassoon; Allison Brewster Franzetti, piano 13:18
08 The Lone Prairee Charles Martin Loeffler Brett Deubner, viola; Paul Cohen, tenor saxophone; Allison Brewster Franzetti, piano 3:48
09 Trio for Fulte, Alto Saxophone & Piano: I. Andante moderato Steve Cohen Kaoru Hinata, flute; Paul Cohen, alto saxophone; Allison Brewster Franzetti, piano 5:12
10 Trio for Fulte, Alto Saxophone & Piano: II. Slow Blues Steve Cohen Kaoru Hinata, flute; Paul Cohen, alto saxophone; Allison Brewster Franzetti, piano 4:59
11 Trio for Fulte, Alto Saxophone & Piano: III. Fast Afro-Cuban Feel Steve Cohen Kaoru Hinata, flute; Paul Cohen, alto saxophone; Allison Brewster Franzetti, piano 4:13

TRACK 1-2 — Recorded at Bordentown Performing Arts Center in Fieldsboro NJ
Recording Engineer Robert Bullington
Digital editing by David Rosenthal & Kaz Fernando at Sonic Adventures Studio

TRACK 3-6 — Recorded at Nicholas Hall at Rutgers University in NJ
Recording Engineer Loren Stata

TRACK 7 — SOS (Sound on Sound studios) in Montclair NJ
Recording Engineer Ed Kessle
Published by To the Fore Publishers / totheforepublishers.com

TRACK 8 — Trading 8’s Studio in NJ
Recording Engineer Chris Sulit
Published by To the Fore Publishers / totheforepublishers.com

TRACK 9-11 — Recorded at Trading 8’s Studio in NJ
Recording Engineer Chris Sulit
Published by Steve Cohen music / stevecohenmusic.net

EQUIPMENT
Alto saxophone – Selmer Mark VI, Caravan mouthpiece, D’Addario Reserve 3.5
Tenor saxophone – Selmer Mark VI, Caravan mouthpiece, D’Addario Reserve 3 +

Cover art: “Western View“ by Marsha Heller marshahellerart.com

General Manager of Audio & Sessions Jan Košulič
Recording Sessions Director Levi Brown
Audio Director Lucas Paquette
Mastering Shaun Michaud

Executive Producer Bob Lord

Executive A&R Sam Renshaw
A&R Director Brandon MacNeil

VP, Design & Marketing Brett Picknell
Art Director Ryan Harrison
Design Edward A. Fleming
Publicity Patrick Niland, Sara Warner

Artist Information

Paul Cohen

Saxophonist

Paul Cohen is a sought-after saxophonist for orchestral and chamber concerts and solo recitals. He has appeared as soloist with the San Francisco Symphony, Richmond Symphony, New Jersey Symphony, Charleston Symphony, and the Philharmonia Virtuosi. His many solo orchestra performances include works by Debussy, Creston, Ibert, Glazunov, Martin, Loeffler, Husa, Dahl, Still, Villa-Lobos, Tomasi, and Cowell. He has also performed with a broad range of orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic, Metropolitan Opera (NYC), American Symphony Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, Santa Fe Opera, New Jersey Symphony, Oregon Symphony, San Diego Symphony, Long Island Philharmonic, Group for Contemporary Music, Greenwich Symphony, and New York Solisti.

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Allison Brewster Franzetti

Pianist

The 2014 and 2018 Latin Grammy® Nominee for Best Classical Album and 2008 Grammy® Nominee for Best Instrumental Soloist without Orchestra, pianist Allison Brewster Franzetti has received international acclaim from critics and audiences alike for her stunning virtuosity and musicality, both as a soloist and chamber musician. Her performances include the live Latin Grammy® Awards television broadcast, the Grammy® Awards Classical Music Tribute to Earl Wild and Lang Lang at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, the American Classical Music Hall of Fame, the Robert Schumann Festival at the Marcella Sembrich Museum in Lake George NY, the Campeche Festival in Mexico, and at the opening of the VI International Festival of Music at the Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

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Todd Nichols

Conductor

Todd Nichols is the artistic director and conductor of the Eastern Wind Symphony and is Director of University Bands at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He serves as a guest conductor, clinician, adjudicator, and recording producer, and is especially honored to have guest conducted the United States Army Field Band. An advocate for new compositions, Nichols has supported the efforts of composers in over 20 commissions from numerous leading composers.

As artistic director for the Eastern Wind Symphony, Nichols conducted performances at Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center and commissioned six new works. Under his direction, the EWS has recently received multiple GRAMMY Award eligibility nominations and has been invited to perform at major conventions including the Midwest Band and Orchestra Clinic, NAfME All Eastern Convention, and Association for Concert Bands National Convention.

Nichols was published in The Conductor’s Companion – 100 Rehearsal Techniques, Imaginative Ideas, Quotes, and Facts. He was inducted into the American Bandmasters Association and American School Band Directors Association in 2016, received two NBA Citations of Excellence, and the New Jersey Governor’s Teacher Recognition Award.

Rebecca Cypess

Harpsichordist

Musicologist and historical keyboardist Rebecca Cypess is Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at the Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. She is the author of Curious and Modern Inventions: Instrumental Music as Discovery in Galileo’s Italy (2016) and Women and Musical Salons in the Enlightenment (forthcoming, 2022). As a performer, Cypess is a specialist in historical keyboard instruments. In recent years she has performed at Columbia University, Queens College, the Center for Jewish History in New York, the University of Pennsylvania, Temple University, Duke University’s Collection of Historic Instruments, Cornell University’s Forte/Piano Festival, and conferences of the American Musicological Society and the Association for Jewish Studies. Cypess is founder and director of the Raritan Players, which has garnered praise for its recordings exploring the performance practices of women in the eighteenth century. She was the 2018 recipient of the Noah Greenberg Award from the American Musicological Society for contributions to historical performance.

Kaoru Hinata

Flutist

Kaoru Hinata has performed with the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, New York City Opera Orchestra, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, and the Glimmerglass Opera Orchestra, and has been a member of the Civic Orchestra of Chicago. She was the first prize winner of the Lawrence Beauregard Competition in Canada and a prize winner in the Myrna Brown Competition in Texas. She has been featured as soloist with the Symphony of Westchester, the Norfolk Festival Chamber Orchestra, and the New York Choral Society Symphony. A dedicated chamber musician who has premiered works by Christopher Theofanidis, Dan Cooper, and Dan Sonenberg, she has also played for Broadway shows such as Sunset Boulevard. She holds degrees from Yale University and Northwestern University, and her teachers include Ransom Wilson, Walfrid Kujala, and Keith Underwood. Kaoru is on the faculty of the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University.

Roger Nye

Bassoonist

Roger Nye joined the bassoon section of the New York Philharmonic in September 2005. He is recognized for his versatility as an orchestral bassoonist, having held principal positions with both the Buffalo Philharmonic and the Sydney Symphony. He was also the second bassoonist of the Omaha Symphony for 11 seasons. He has held teaching positions at Augustana College and Sioux Falls College, both in Sioux Falls SD, while serving as the Principal Bassoonist of the South Dakota Symphony.

Nye has performed as soloist with the South Dakota Symphony, the Omaha Symphony, the National Repertory Orchestra with Joseph Silverstein, and the Sydney Symphony. He has also been a performer on the New York Philharmonic’s Merkin chamber music series. He is currently on the Faculty of Manhattan School of Music and the Mason Gross School of Music at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

Kathleen Nester

Flutist

Kathleen Nester is Solo Piccolo/Assistant Principal Flute of the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra and flutist in the Stamford Symphony Orchestra in Connecticut. Nester is a highly sought-after freelance artist in the NYC metropolitan area and has performed with the New York Philharmonic, New York City Opera, Orchestra of St. Luke’s, Mostly Mozart, Lincoln Center, Caramoor, and Bravo! Vail Music Festivals. She has been featured as a concerto soloist on flute, piccolo, and recorder with the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, the Stamford Symphony Orchestra, and on tours of Japan with The New York Symphonic Ensemble.

Nester has been the solo flutist for several Broadway productions, including the revivals of Man of La Mancha, Evita, An American in Paris, and Sunset Boulevard. She can be heard on flute, piccolo, alto flute, and bass flute on many motion picture soundtracks, including Julie and Julia, The Alamo, Tower Heist, and The Joker. Nester maintains a private teaching studio in New York City, coaches the Greater Newark Youth Orchestra, and is a member of the adjunct flute faculty at New York University.

Brett Deubner

Violist

Brett Deubner, one of the foremost violists of his generation, is an international soloist and chamber musician who has performed with orchestras on five continents. Deubner has performed with more than 80 orchestras in 11 countries and has made 20 CDs on labels such as Naxos, Centaur, Innova, Navona, and Albany, recording music written for him as well as other new music for viola.

A devoted and passionate chamber music collaborator, Deubner has performed with Pinchas Zukerman, Joseph Kalichstein, Andre Michel-Schub, the Tokyo Quartet, Vermeer Quartet, and Colorado Quartet, as well as clarinetist Guy Deplus and flutists Ransom Wilson and Carol Wincenc. Deubner is endorsed by D’Addario Strings and is on the string faculty of the Aaron Copland School of Music at Queens College in New York City and the Round Top Festival in Texas.

Lynne Cohen

Oboist

Oboist Lynne Cohen plays both oboe and english horn as a soloist, orchestral player, and commercial artist. In addition to being Principal Oboe of the Riverside Sinfonia and a member of the Bethlehem Bach Orchestra, she had previously served as Principal Oboe of the Palm Beach Symphony, Opera and Ballet. She has performed with many of the orchestras in the New York City area, including the New Jersey Symphony, Orchestra of St. Lukes, Westfield Symphony, Hartford Symphony, Stamford and New York Grand Operas, New York Virtuosi, Queens Symphony, and Brooklyn Philharmonic.

On Broadway, Cohen has held permanent positions in Broadway shows including Miss Saigon, Ragtime, Porgy and Bess, La Boheme, Cinderella, and Les Miserables. She can be heard on multiple cast albums and on recordings of Harry Connick, Kelli O’Hara, Jason Robert Brown, John Miller and the Gotham Winds, as well as the NBC broadcasts of The Sound of Music and Peter Pan. Cohen resides in Chatham with her husband, the conductor Constantine Kitsopoulos, where she maintains an active oboe studio.

The Eastern Wind Symphony

Ensemble

The Eastern Wind Symphony, founded in the spring of 1996, is a wind ensemble of 65 professional musicians from the New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania areas. The EWS has presented performances at Carnegie Hall, John F. Kennedy Center, New Jersey Performing Arts Center, and Patriots Theater at the War Memorial. The EWS has also performed at The Midwest Clinic, Northeast Horn Conference, Association for Concert Bands National Convention, International Trumpet Guild Conference, and multiple NaFME Eastern Division Conferences.

Internationally acclaimed musicians including Stanley Drucker, Phil Smith, Paul Cohen, Joe Alessi, Alan Baer, Greg Giannascoli, and Allen Vizzutti have performed with the ensemble. The EWS is proud to be active in commissioning for wind band from today’s leading composers, including Julie Giroux, Joseph Spaniola, Bruce Yurko, Kevin Bobo, and William Ryden. The EWS has produced commercial CDs on the Klavier, Curnow Music Press, and MASTERS labels and is proud to now be represented on Navona Records. www.easternwindsymphony.org

Notes

The Concerto for Alto Saxophone by Ingolf Dahl (1912 – 1970) exists today in a twice revised version substantially different from the original composition. From the time of its completion (1949) until its publication (1980), the concerto endured an undocumented history of revisions and performances that reflected changing attitudes of the composer and the varying abilities of the soloists. As a result of these extensive revisions, only one of which was publicly acknowledged by Dahl, the concerto was radically transformed into the work known today.

Composed in 1948 and 1949 for Sigurd Rascher, the concerto was scored for full concert band with a duration of 28 minutes. Rascher had been deeply impressed by Dahl’s Music for Brass Instruments and sought to interest him in a saxophone concerto. Rascher asked for a work that would take into account the full artistic and technical resources of the saxophone and wanted Dahl’s artistic imagination to be in no way compromised by conventional limitations, either of the saxophone or music for winds. Dahl knew of Rascher from his European and American performances and recordings, and immediately was interested. At the time Dahl was also interested in the wind ensemble, especially the concert band. He saw the need to elevate the wind medium with music of greater sophistication and complexity. The ensemble of a concert band accompanying the saxophone was a perfect combination and Dahl enthusiastically embraced the project.

The result was an extraordinary work that is as much for the band as it is for the saxophone. The duration, complexity and sophistication of the original version puts unusual demands on the ensemble and soloist. Sigurd Rascher premiered the original version on May 17, l949 with the University of Illinois Concert Band under the direction of Mark Hindsley, and later performed the work over 11 times between 1949 and 1960 with the finest college bands in the United States. Rascher considered it one the very best works written for him. At the time, Dahl expressed great satisfaction and enthusiasm for the work. In a letter to Rascher, Dahl wrote of playing the concerto for Igor Stravinksy:

“You will be interested that I finally gathered my courage and took both record and score to Stravinsky and played the record to him. It was one of the greatest experiences of my life. After it was over, he said nothing but just got up and embraced me, with moist eyes, and in Russian fashion kissed me on both cheeks. He thinks it is one of the best new things he has heard. After that praise, from that great man, everything else seems to matter little, as you will understand. I will always be grateful to you for bringing this about.”

Despite critical acclaim for this version, including enthusiastic responses from Igor Stravinsky and Henry Cowell, Dahl first revised the work in l953. He changed the concert band instrumentation to orchestral winds, rewrote the last movement and simplified the solo saxophone part. Among many changes, the necessity of playing within the altissimo range was eliminated. The length of this version was approximately the same as the original (1949) version (26-28 minutes).

From 1958 to 1959, Dahl revised the concerto a second time. These revisions, never publicly acknowledged, consisted almost exclusively of cuts and deletions of sections in the second and third movements. With over seven minutes (approximately 25% of the work) deleted, the length of this last version—that which is published today—is 18–19 minutes. Some of the deleted material was inserted into his Sinfonietta for Concert Band that he was writing at the time. Dahl destroyed all the parts and scores of the original version, in part because of the duplication of material found in the Sinfonietta. I discovered the last remaining set in a reference library that Dahl had apparently overlooked. This is the first recording of the original version.

For more information on the original version of the Dahl Concerto for Saxophone, please reference my article The Secret Life of the Original 1949 Saxophone Concerto of Ingolf Dahl, or my book on the concerto, The Original 1949 Saxophone Concerto of Ingolf Dahl: A Historical and Comparative Analysis. Contact paulcohen.saxo@gmail.com or totheforepublishers.com for details and availability.

— Paul Cohen

The Swiss composer and performer Marguerite Roesgen – Champion (1894 – 1976) specialized in the harpsichord. In Switzerland she studied with Ernest Bloch and E. Jacques-Dalcroze, among others. Beginning in 1926, she lived in Paris and dedicated herself exclusively to her work as a composer. She wrote works for large orchestra, harpsichord, piano, vocals, and chamber ensembles. During the last century, Roesgen-Champion was one of the most highly regarded harpsichordists and women composers in France.

Concerto No. 2 is from 1945, and reflects the post-Ravelian Impressionism that was a significant part of the French musical landscape of the mid-20th Century. The scoring for bassoon, saxophone, and harpsichord is original, as the saxophone was known to be well suited to classical chamber, orchestra, and operatic works throughout the century.

Charles Martin Loeffler (1861 – 1935) was one of the most respected composers in the United States at the time of his death. Born and educated in Europe, Loeffler moved to the United States at age 20 (1881), eventually settling in Boston. He was originally trained as a violinist and had a distinguished career as an orchestral musician, serving as assistant concertmaster with the Boston Symphony Orchestra for 21 seasons. Loeffler began composing seriously in the mid-1880s, and after his retirement from the BSO in 1903 divided his time between composition, teaching violin, and overseeing his farm in Medfield MA. His early music has strong French Impressionist qualities infused with Irish, Spanish, and medieval Russian elements, while his later works reveal the influence of Indigenous styles of American music including jazz and folk. His more famous compositions include Two Rhapsodies for oboe, viola, and piano, and Evocations for orchestra, commissioned by the Cleveland Orchestra.

Ballade Carnavalesque for flute, oboe, alto saxophone, bassoon, and piano is an expansive, 14-minute multisection work played without pause. Written in 1903 for Elise Hall (for whom Loeffler also wrote his Divertissement Espagnol in 1901), the Ballade was given its first performance on January 25, 1904 at the Longy Club in Boston. The work is of considerable interest to saxophonists, for not only is the Ballade related to the harmonic and melodic vocabulary of the Two Rhapsodies, it is one of the earliest chamber works in which the saxophone is fully incorporated into the texture of an ensemble. It is not clear what Loeffler thought of the Ballade Carnavalesque. Although some themes were used years later in Loeffler’s orchestral work A Pagan Poem, the Ballade was never published and only performed once more, two years later. The manuscript was lost for some 75 years until I discovered a copy of the holograph score in the uncatalogued stacks of the Library of Congress. I reconciled this score with the score housed at the New England Conservatory Library. Special permission was granted by both libraries, and I re-premiered the work in 1978, and published it some years later.

— Paul Cohen

The Lone Prairee, written c. 1930, is scored for tenor saxophone, viola d’amore, and piano. Charles Martin Loeffler, who was an accomplished performer on the viola d’amore and viola, wrote the viola d’amore part so that it may also be played on viola.

The Lone Prairee has always been listed in the various catalogues of Charles Martin Loeffler’s compositions as being incomplete. Paul Cohen and I found the undated holograph sketches and scores for the piece in the Loeffler Collection in the Music Division of the Library of Congress in Washington DC. In 1991, the Loeffler scholar Ellen Knight directed me to a little‑known five-page holograph of The Lone Prairee which is in effect virtually complete. This second score, although contained in the Loeffler Collection in Washington, is not catalogued.

Although the work is listed by Ellen Knight as “A Paraphrase on Two Western Cowboy Songs,” all the holograph material is simply headed The Lone Prairee. I have traced the two tunes used by Loeffler to an issue of the Wa‑Wan Press Magazine (Vol. IV, Spring 1905) where they appeared with harmonizations by Arthur Farwell. Farwell credits Henry Gilbert with collecting the melody of the cowboy song The Lone Prairee and Alice Haskell with collecting the words and tune to the [African American] spiritual Moanin’ Dove from inhabitants of the South Carolina coastal islands.

— Bruce Gbur, performer and musicologist

The Trio was written in 2018 for Guy Dellacave, one of Paul Cohen’s students at the Manhattan School of Music. It is one of a series of solo and chamber works that Cohen (b. 1954) has written for the saxophone, including sonatas, saxophone quartets and mixed chamber music.

  1. “Andante”: A slow, ruminative figure for flute is answered by the saxophone a tri-tone away, with a main subject in three-bar phrases, and a secondary subject first heard as a piano solo. The movement closes with a return to the andante material.
  1. “Slow Blues”: An introduction for solo piano soon modulates for an extended song-form with a bluesy feel to it. Flute takes the lead in the first section, and saxophone takes over for the contrasting second section, which leads to a flute-saxophone duet for the final section. The movement ends in ambiguous evanescence.
  1. “Fast Afro-Cuban Feel”: The solo saxophone starts this movement in a lively dance with alternating meters and rhythms. Towards the middle, a new theme is heard from the solo piano, and is taken up in turn by the flute and the saxophone. Towards the end, this theme is heard in augmentation over the material from the main section.

— Steve Cohen