Lake Champlain Chamber Music Festival Spotlights Sax and Guitar in a Spring Concert 

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• Photos Courtesy Of Lake Champlain Chamber Music Festival
• Jason Vieaux (left) and Timothy McAllister

Composers have written for some unusual duos — Elliott Carter for bassoon and viola, for instance, or Camille Saint-Saëns for piano and harmonium. But the pairing that will appear at All Souls Interfaith Gathering in Shelburne for two concerts on Tuesday, April 11, is downright intriguing: saxophone and classical guitar.

Saxophonist Timothy McAllister and guitarist Jason Vieaux, both Grammy Award winners and major figures in their fields, will play a concert built around a commissioned piece by Pierre Jalbert, a New Hampshire-born composer who grew up in Vermont and played in the Vermont Youth Orchestra Association.

Jalbert is not the only composer to have written for sax and guitar duos; the program also includes works by Andrew Zohn and David Conte. Other composers featured may be more familiar to audiences, including Astor Piazzolla, whose piece for flute and guitar McAllister arranged for the duo; and jazz great Pat Metheny, who wrote a guitar solo on the program for Vieaux.

The idea of pairing McAllister and Vieaux and asking Jalbert to compose for them came from violinist Soovin Kim and pianist Gloria Chien, a musical couple who head three chamber-music series between them. Kim is the founder and artistic director of the Lake Champlain Chamber Music Festival, which will present Tuesday's concerts. Together, they are artistic directors of Chamber Music Northwest in Portland, Ore.; Chien founded and is artistic director of the String Theory chamber music series in Chattanooga, Tenn.

Jalbert's piece for the program, Sweet and Doleful Timbres, was a co-commission of all three of those groups; McAllister and Vieaux premiered it at Chamber Music Northwest in July 2021.

Like Jalbert, both musicians have ties to Vermont. McAllister recently recorded and toured an album that includes a work written for him by Middlebury College assistant music professor and composer Matthew Evan Taylor, a fellow saxophonist. And David Serkin Ludwig, LCCMF's resident composer, has written two works for Vieaux. The two met at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where Vieaux cofounded the guitar program in 2011.

This program is Vieaux's first collaboration with a saxophonist. Asked in a phone interview what it's like to play classical guitar alongside a saxophone, he said it was only possible with an amplifier.

"You definitely want to use the amplifier because the sax is quite loud. We really have the balance now," said Vieaux, who heads the guitar department at the Cleveland Institute of Music.

McAllister, who has collaborated with guitarists before, said, "You have to learn to temper your sound, be careful about balances, elevate the entirety of the work. Jason has a wonderful high-end speaker designed to amplify but not distort. That brings [the guitar] up to an equal general volume; within that, we are still capable of the nuances and subtleties of chamber music. It's a fun challenge."

A professor at the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance, McAllister said he plays the full range of saxophones. He is the soprano sax chair of the acclaimed saxophone ensemble PRISM Quartet and premiered two works by John Adams for alto sax, including Saxophone Concerto, which Adams wrote for him.

While most classical music is written for the alto sax and most jazz for tenor sax, Jalbert's piece is for soprano. A straight instrument often mistaken for a gold clarinet, soprano sax is "the most challenging [saxophone] to play from the stamina and strength side of it," McAllister said.

It was the suggestion of a soprano sax that helped inspire Jalbert's work, according to Kim, who told the story in a recorded virtual talk with the composer and Vieaux for Chamber Music Northwest.

Kim and Vieaux have known each other since the two began studying at the Cleveland Institute of Music, when Kim was 15 and Vieaux 17. While attending a concert by Branford Marsalis' jazz quartet, Kim recalled, he texted his friend to ask what the guitarist thought of a guitar-sax duo. Vieaux thought guitar would work well with soprano sax. When Kim approached Marsalis backstage after the concert with the same question, the saxophonist had the same answer.

Of the program's six works, Jalbert's is "the most weighted [and] requires the most focus and concentration," McAllister said. It also, he added, "provides this great vehicle to explore the duo itself and curate a program" that's both lyrical and accessible.

Regarding the question of accessibility, McAllister expressed doubts about using the label "contemporary music," noting that composers these days synthesize many different influences to "come up with their own voices. Twenty-first-century music could be anything," he said — from "pop" to "heady."

It is composers' ability to "fuse all those tools that is bringing audiences back to classical [music]," he opined.

That is certainly the case for this concert: The evening show has already sold out, so the LCCMF added a second performance in the afternoon. The turnout bodes well for the summer festival's rare foray into off-season concerts.