Karen Devroop with the Johannesburg Festival Orchestra 2019 POPS Concert

Abstract

This creative output involves a solo performance on my part as soloist with the Johannesburg Festival Orchestra at ZK Matthews Great Hall in Pretoria. Being invited to perform as soloist with an orchestra is a huge honour. Only a handful of artists are invited to perform as soloists with any given orchestra during a regular symphony season. The process of being selected to perform with orchestra is dependent upon the artist’s profile, their performance abilities and to a lesser extent, the artist’s chosen repertoire.

This concert presented a new and innovative take on the use of saxophone as a solo instrument within an orchestra. Historically, saxophone soloists have performed some of the well-known saxophone concertos with orchestra. It is very rare to have a jazz saxophonist perform works (such as compositions by Astor Piazzola) performed with orchestra. Historically these works have been performed with violin soloist and orchestra. To date, I am not aware of any other South African jazz saxophonists that have been afforded the opportunity to perform as soloist with a South African orchestra.

In this concert I attempted to perform the works in a more traditional/classical sense but with jazz inflections and jazz improvisation. Hence, the performance attempted to bridge the gap between classical and jazz by using the saxophone as the solo instrument. To do this, I had several works by Astor Piazzola arranged for saxophone and full orchestra. To the best of my knowledge and after a long and intensive search, I found no arrangements for saxophone and orchestra for any of his works. Accordingly I worked with an arranger and had the works arranged specifically for this concert. Additional concerts, both nationally and internationally, are planned. Because these were original orchestra arrangements, I took the liberty of creating room for jazz improvisation within the arrangements. Hence, this brought a new and unique take on these amazing compositions.

From a performance perspective, this concert required me to spend at least 6 months practising the saxophone parts and creating original improvisation that would be appropriate for this setting. This proved to be very challenging as typically in a jazz setting, the soloist relies on the interaction of piano, bass, drums and the soloist to create original jazz improvisations. In this setting I had to create the improvisation without any interaction, just the backing harmonies of the orchestra. Additionally, the jazz improvisation had to be appropriate to the style of the music which was not traditional or contemporary but rather orchestral which blended traditional classical/western art, Argentinian Tango, and Jazz.

This performance occurred in front of a live audience of approximately 600 people in ZK Matthews Hall. The concert was widely publicised in print media, social medial, online media and nationally on several radio stations across South Africa. ZK Matthews Great Hall on the Unisa Muckleneuk campus is undoubtedly considered to be one of the premier performance venues in South Africa. As soloist I was afforded two rehearsals with the orchestra prior to the final performance – one rehearsal and one full dress rehearsal.

This creative output breaks new ground as this has not been done before in a South African context (saxophone with orchestra blending classical/western art, Tango and Jazz). The arrangements are original, the conceptualisation innovative and the performance at a very high level. Accordingly, this creative output meets the requirements for being original, innovative, rigorous (from a performance perspective) and well conceptualised.