On her first chamber music album for Berlin Classics, saxophonist Asya Fateyeva looks back to the glory days of her instrument in the Twenties of...

On her first chamber music album for Berlin Classics, saxophonist Asya Fateyeva looks back to the glory days of her instrument in the Twenties of the last century the sax was the voice of modern salon music and an equal partner to the other instruments of the classical chamber ensemble Even as it enjoyed its heyday dark clouds were gathering on the horizon This is an album that occupies the territory between danceable urban rhythms cultural ostracism and groundbreaking developments in music. “I am totally fascinated by the different ways in which composers use music to talk their own language and express their own world view You almost have the feeling that there must be a few centuries separating them Adolf Busch, Paul Hindemith and Anton Webern treat the saxophone as a sonic medium, virtually as a means to an end Erwin Schulhoff, Kurt Weill and Ernst Krenek employ it essentially to express the zeitgeist and to voice the bitterness the sarcasm and the ambivalent attitude towards life and death that marked the 1920s. Her chamber music partners in crime are Emma Yoon and Florian Donderer on violin Yuko Hara on viola cellist Tanja Tetzlaff, Stepan Simonian at the piano and Shirley Brill playing clarinet. “The great thing about a chamber recording is that it’s very intimate We are all in equilibrium we all play an equal part in the proceedings It’s not as if I do my thing as a soloist and they are my accompaniment Each musician and each personality is very important.”