João Luís is an interpreter. If you read his programme of today, you’d see he signs his interventions as ‘arrangements’, which is formally truthful, but doesn’t do justice to his role: he has intervened with the composition. He has taken it from a place where it was a Debussy, a Ravel, a Saint-Saëns, and reinterpreted them into a limbo where they are neither wholly theirs nor entirely his; they belong, if one is concerned with authorship, to genius, to the exceptional insight that surpasses last names, as it belongs to the ether.
To such genius about one hundred musical enthusiasts were privy earlier today in Christ Church, where Mr. Luís played the saxophone alongside a superbly talented Ms. Madeleine Brown’s piano for about 50 minutes, as part of Christ Church’s Midweek Music programme.
It was stunned by their take on Maurice Ravel’s «Pièce en forme de habanera», fresh and vigorous, so when they came out with François Borne’s «Fantaisie Brillante sur Carmen» I had only so much amazement left in me; this piece not only showcased Ms. Brown’s piano skills, but brought out Mr. Luís’ fingering agility to the forefront, because by the time they hit «L'amour est un oiseau rebelle» it seemed that there were actually two saxophones on stage.
«Cometa sax» by Jorge Salgueiro was the closing piece. It was a very interesting construct that went from a rather lyrical, gentle, «Somewhere in my memory» type melody to a rather industrial clanging that might have left Christ Church’s Yamaha in need of a tuning. Experimental pieces like these art, to me, either hit or miss, and not much in between, but, you see, I was I was already far too mesmerised not to love it.