The Database now has over 700 entries of ballets and operas that include the saxophone in the orchestration. Here are today’s entries.
Faber Music is a London based publisher that focuses on English language stage works. In the saxophone database, the earliest work from Faber Music is Benjamin Britten’s 1940 Paul Bunyan. Other composers listed in the database are Carl Davis, Nigel Hess, Colin Matthews, Humphrey Searle, Jonathan Harvey, Thomas Adès, John Woolrich, and Torsten Rasch.
Dilia is a publisher based in the Czech Republic and publishes the works of Czech composers. What I find fascinating as I compile this list is how popular the saxophone is in works by Czech composers. In this database, the earliest Czech ballet that uses the saxophone is Maly Balet, composed in 1926 by Iša Krejcí. From the Dilia catalog, the database has works by Otmar Mácha, Ladislav Simon, Zdeněk Pololáník, Karel Odstrčil, Václav Trojan, Jan Hanuš, Ludvík Podéšť, Josef Berg, and Věroslav Neumann. If you want to search Czech composers, the name needs to be exact for the composer field. With all the symbols in Czech names, the easiest way to search is by “Nationality” or use the “Lastname” field and spell their names without symbols.
the Operatic Saxophone 