March, 2012 |
Amy Dickson demonstrated her affinity for lighter music in Smile, her debut album on RCA. She has a unique sound on the soprano sax, slightly reedy and metallic with an expressive and superbly controlled vibrato that she uses with great sensitivity. She plays alto saxophone, as scored, in the central Serenade movement of the concerto and the first part of the third. Here too the sound is distinctive: focused and warm; more the complexity of burnished brass than gold, and with a thrilling edge when projected. She can channel a bit of harmonica, or oboe, or a dance band jazz soloist, whatever it takes to fully characterize Joseph Holbrooke's strange but beguiling combination of French chanson, Impressionism, and flapper-era dance in his Concerto for Saxophone (1927). Again on soprano, she adopts a variety of textures and colors to complement the several moods and styles of the nostalgic Seven Country Dances, Bennett's virtuosic, folkish adaptation of tunes from John Playford’s The English Dancing Master of 1651. She approaches these two solo works with just the right touch, taking them at face value, and never suggesting that they are anything but works of substance, which in her hands they become.
Ronald Grames
Fanfare magazine |
March, 2012 |
‘Amy Dickson’s creamy-smooth tonal palette is impressive particularly in the short, mellifluous cadenza, and in the central Serenade, a movement with alluringly oriental colourings, and a fleetingly Debussyan flavour.’
Terry Blain
BBC Music Magazine |
