Listen on Apple Podcasts Listen on Google Podcasts Listen on Spotify Quatuor Ellipsos - renowned French Saxophone Quartet - 32 by Barry Cockcroft | The Barry Sax Show document.createElement('audio'); https://content.blubrry.com/barry_sax_show/Ellipsos-Quartet.mp3 About Quatuor Ellipsos Quatuor Ellipsos, originally from Nantes, France, this world-class quartet distinguishes itself by its openness and its versatility: playing classic repertoire to the music of our time. They recorded their first eclectic album “Medina” in 2007 with the saxophonist and composer Philippe Geiss and this has now sold over 5,000 copies. In the same year, Ellipsos launched their summer academy training young musicians which is still running to this day. They have distinguished themselves by writing and subsequently publishing their own arrangments. They have developed a significant following and share a wide range of live performances on their entertaining YouTube channel. These four musicians met during their studies in France, working with Vincent David and Jean-Yves Fourmeau. Ellipsos has continued to collaborate with leading composers and instrumentalists and regularly tour throughout the world. Show Links Ellipsos Facebook Ellipsos Quartet Instagram Ellipsos YouTube Philippe Geiss Quatuor Ellipsos Members Julien BRECHET Nicolas HERROUET Sylvain JARRY Paul-Fathi LACOMBE. Transcript of Podcast interview With Quatuor Ellipsos Barry Cockcroft: Ellipsos — thank you very much for, first of all, playing a beautiful concert here in Columbia. It was lovely to hear you play and the audience loved it. As you saw, very good reaction from the audience. So it is always happy when people can play the music they love and then also the public also have that same feeling. Is good. Thank you. Barry Cockcroft: And thank you for taking the time this morning. I know there’s some site seeing and nice things to do here in [Kali 00:00:38], but you’ve taken the time to talk with me, so thank you. I would love to know how this group got started because you’ve been playing together for many years. Quatuor Ellipsos – Paul-Fathi LACOMBE: Yeah, now the adventure of Ellipsos started 16 years ago. We don’t count the years, after years because we love to pass time together and it’s a music story, it’s a dream story for us because we live our passion every day, every moment, every seconds. We are connected together. We are only three this morning so we miss one guy, he had a saxophone, [Giu 00:01:20] is not with us because he take his flight this morning. Yesterday evening. We are three. A quartet, three we do also. We can play together at three, but no we are four. Ellipsos is a group of four friends. Four brothers. It’s more than friendly. I think it’s really about brothers. We met together during university in summer University in [inaudible 00:01:54] academy and [Gap 00:01:56] University in France. And the moment we passed together was amazing because we had teachers amazing with a [inaudible 00:02:07] quartet, with [inaudible 00:02:08] with many other teachers. And that’s why we discovered the passion from the quartet. And we started in 2004 to create our quartet about saxophone, classical saxophone, but not only classical music, world music, a little bit jazz music, and especially element that we write the music, our own music, our own arrangement. Quatuor Ellipsos – Sylvain JARRY: Sure the arrangement is something which is particular, we particularly I will say defend because we have the capacity of doing it, thanks to Nicola makes a lot of, not a lot, absolutely all the arrangements we play. And this is a great quality we have inside the four of us. And this is a way for us to make the repertoire larger and larger and larger. Such as we can order some works to composers that we do also sure we do it less, but we do too. And other saxophonists do it too, and this is mainly our main way to enlarge the network. Barry Cockcroft: So these arrangements that you do are published? Quatuor Ellipsos – Sylvain JARRY: Some are. We have a collection at [Biudu 00:03:52], which is a French editor. And then this is first, we feel very lucky to be able to offer these arrangements to everyone who wants because we’ve been asked a lot before we had this collection to give these scores. And we’ve done it very little that it was a bit difficult because there is difficulties about propriety and- Barry Cockcroft: Copyright. Quatuor Ellipsos – Sylvain JARRY: Copyright exactly. So this collection is now for us a very great help. Barry Cockcroft: I guess sometimes if you have a unique repertoire, because you’ve written the arrangements, you maybe don’t want everybody else playing the same pieces, because in some way that would mean everybody’s heard this one before by the student quartet or this other quartet. So, maybe for a while you wanted to keep these pieces a little bit to yourselves. It seems now you are very happy to- Quatuor Ellipsos – Sylvain JARRY: Just share. Exactly that’s it. We really feel we like people to play this too and propose another interpretation of this course because we play this course, but this is just one way to play it and we’ll love to hear other ways to play them. Barry Cockcroft: I’m very curious with the arrangement. Are you trained? Have you trained in composition and harmony and all of these things or you are a natural? Quatuor Ellipsos – Nicolas HERROUET: No, I trained. I studied harmony and orchestration and analysis at Nante Conservatoire. It’s very important to be able to make good arrangements. And so to have a good knowledge about it, so for me it’s very important to make, to have this formation to have this knowledge about arrangement. Barry Cockcroft: Do you think in the saxophone world, we are often playing new music, new music, new music, new music. Always new music. Many people playing new music. It’s not that many people playing a classical repertoire or transcriptions and arrangements. Do you think this is something that other quartets should do more of. Quatuor Ellipsos – Paul-Fathi LACOMBE: For my part I think the repertoire is very little for a saxophone. We can’t to be too much excision about our repertoire. I think the choices of repertoire for students is to create the … we have to create music. That’s why many saxophonists play their own music. And I think it’s problematic but with the time if we compare with the violin repertoire for example, the world has changed because in the past every musician give the partition the score hands by hands. No internet, no connection. So it was very slow. The time was slow. Now, all is fast. So when someone in Japan do something at the side of the world they know instantly immediately, and so it changed all the approach is very different now and I think a saxophone student and saxophone repertoire is more and more connected and we are more and more connected and curious each other. So Nicolas, yes. Quatuor Ellipsos – Nicolas HERROUET: I think saxophone repertoire is not so big, but it exists. And at the beginning with Ellipsos we made a lot of arrangements and we became a little bit famous thanks to that. We were [inaudible 00:08:25] for example, but now with our teachers such as [inaudible 00:08:33], a famous clarinettist who told us, if you want to have a good career you have to create your own repertoire and not only transcriptions. And we thought about it and now I think we have to defend also the saxophone repertoire. And that’s why we on each recording we have transcriptions, but also an original repertoire. And the last one United Careers, only original repertoire. And I think it’s very important too because we can’t create only transcriptions. Quatuor Ellipsos – Paul-Fathi LACOMBE: The time, my obsession is the time because when you do something at one moment you have to think to the future and when you create music now, you have to think through the future in 40 years, 50 years, 60 years. And so if you do both, you can do new music with old music. With [inaudible 00:09:48] you can do new music. Really for example we play Bach, many Bach with Thiery [shkish 00:09:57] an organist, amazing organist and composer or so. And Thiery, when we play together we have the impression to play contemporary music with Bach really. And so the feeling of time is completely stopped. And so in reality all music or new music is mixed. Barry Cockcroft: This is a very practical question, do you all live in the same town? Quatuor Ellipsos – Paul-Fathi LACOMBE: We don’t. Barry Cockcroft: So to play so well, how do you rehearse and how often do you meet to do this? Quatuor Ellipsos – Sylvain JARRY: There are two points to answer this. The first one is the past and the very beginning of the quartet where we used to spend at least one whole day a week to rehearse and to spend time together from 8:00 or 9:00 in the morning to 9:00 PM. And this was when we still lived in the same city, something like, more or less. But it was easier than today. And today we still rehearse one day every two weeks. We still take time to call each other many times in the week and we have particularly one appointment a week to call each other four, as four. Once a week and we spend like two hours phone call to talk about organisation and which music we’re going to play next time next year or something like that. And also our lives because as Paul-Fathi LACOMBE was saying in the beginning we are also friends and brothers, and we have to share everything about our lives and that we need these ti
