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| I touched your glistening tears (2000) by Brenton Broadstock | This work by Brenton Broadstock accompanies a heart-wrenching poem by the composer, telling of a father's sorrow and anger as he watches the decline of a severely handicapped child. The message is intimate and painful, but the music is disarmingly simple – an arpeggiated accompaniment marking time below a yearning melody, occasionally choked by grace notes. |
| Sonata for alto saxophone and piano (2002) by Stuart Greenbaum | A significant work with tremendous technical and musical challenges. 1st movement ('moderate, expansive') is akin to climbing successively higher mountains on the way to the summit. Ensuing repose is drawn out in a timeless fashion. Slow variations provide a reflective gear change, morphing from formally phrased melodic lines into an elated groove. Final movement races along, playing on ambiguous rhythmic groupings and finally rising up to a heightened plane of ecstasy. |
| | Crazy logic (2006) by Matthew Orlovich | Orlovich uses musical ideas of a mostly intense and driving nature. His melodic lines comprise semiquavers which twist, scurry, and traverse up and down the musical staves at a great pace. The instrumentalists often play in unison or at the octave, lending added urgency and directness to the music. While a softer, reflective mood is revealed at the heart of the work, it is the energetic music with its chromatic kinks, jagged contours and wide leaps that elicits, mood alluded to in the title. |
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| Phospheric variations (1998) by Paul Stanhope | An approachable and immediately likeable work. The title is derived from a series of word associations: 'phosphorescent': luminescent green – vibrancy and nature; 'spherics' – cycles and seasons; 'phospherics': cycles of nature, cycles of life. Extensive unison lines between piano and saxophone create warm colours and expressive phrasing is required throughout. The piece alternates between lyrical melodic passages and flowing semiquaver runs. |
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| Black & blue (1995) by Barry Cockcroft | Cockroft's early, accessible and popular solo piece. The player imitates instruments, bass guitar, electric, drums, interspersed with bluesy saxophone phrases, culminating in a free-for-all with circular breathing, screaming high notes and wa-wa guitar. |
| | Naked hum (2005) by Taran Carter | Naked Hum is a virtuosic and atmospheric piece that explores texture, density, distorted repetition and disco rhythms. |