A Conductor’s and Performer’s Guide to Steven Bryant’s Concerto for Alto Saxophone - Chester Jenkins

98 able to from 2013. And I’d be happy to do that in the next few days. I don’t know if I have it, you know how emails are. It could have been very well a phone conversation. I don’t know. But that’s where we’re going with this whole thing. And then there’s a period as he was writing the piece in the fall before 2014, that’d be ’13, I came from a meeting, a dress rehearsal, featuring our new clarinet faculty, Guy Yehuda. A brilliant clarinetist. We had John Corigliano on campus. Now, stupid me….I should’ve known this when it was set up before. But I didn’t think about this earlier on that this concerto was going to come about, that John and Steven had such a close relationship. I knew they studied together, you know Steven was one of his top students. Well, I came from hearing the Corigliano Clarinet Concerto . Now, you know this piece. Everybody knows this piece. In my world, I don’t think of the Clarinet Concerto first and foremost on my top list of pieces to give to Steven Bryant. But I heard the first movement in that dress rehearsal, with the band, and I heard the whole thing. JENKINS: Yeah LULLOFF: I came away from that, went right to my car in the Wharton Center on my way home, called Steven up. I said, ‘Steven, remember what pieces you want, I know that’s been a couple of months ago. We talked about the Dahl Concerto and this and that. But, if you can…I’m stupid…I didn’t tell you about this, I just forgot. I’m sorry. But this clarinet concerto, oh man, I was blown away with that. Maybe you might want to channel your teacher. He said, ‘It’s funny you said that.’ JENKINS: (Laughs) LULLOFF: He said, ‘It’s funny you said that.’ He said, ‘I was thinking about that for the first movement.’ I said, ‘What?’ You know, it’s kind of the same thing, it was action after this whole commissioning arrangement was made. I was driving back to school one day and thinking, ‘I just got a major commission with a major composer. This guy down in Bloomfield Hills, Howard Gourwitz, loves the saxophone enough, and finds that whatever I do, that maybe I could be the person….am I here? Is this a dream? You know, it’s like fate, you know what I’m saying? Certain things fall into place for a reason, thank the Lord. And God’s watching on us. And I think…I’m a very religious person, in that regard. I mean, I should have gone to church this morning, sorry. My Catholic upbringing. But the point is, things started falling into place. I started getting snippets of this concerto. Yeah…(sings opening measures of the first movement)…by the way, I was testing the LefreQue, those LefreQue things, that first line came right back to me. I had him on my mind…I started hearing that. Again, these emotions come back. So, the point being, is that Steven starts sending little snippets, and I was on tour that fall with Capitol Quartet up in the New England area, Vermont. And I’d get these little emailed passages that I’d have to record for him, that I’d have to send back. And I got some comment back, and Chris Crevison was there, and he says, ‘God, that sounds really good, what is this.”