Biography

The Sidera Saxophone Quartet brings together four musicians who are among the most active and distinctive figures on the Italian contemporary music scene. The quartet was founded with the aim of exploring, expanding and promoting the contemporary and experimental repertoire for saxophone quartet, ranging from the historical avant-garde to the latest compositional developments, with particular attention to the possibilities offered by electronics.

The quartet has performed at major festivals and music institutions in Italy and abroad, including Festival Angelica, Amici della Musica in Modena and Perugia, Festival Orizzonti, Area Sismica, Festival Musicale Piceno, Festival ilSUONO, CIM – Colloquio di Informatica Musicale, Festival Mixtur (Barcelona), Unerhörte Musik (Berlin), Nuova Consonanza (Rome), GAMO (Florence), Forlì Open, BIOMA Festival (San Marino) and Trame Sonore (Mantua).

A central part of the Sidera Saxophone Quartet’s artistic research is its direct dialogue with composers and the development of new repertoire. The quartet has been the dedicatee of numerous works, including Quadrangoli d’autunno (2021) by Salvatore Sciarrino, created with the support of the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation; Neuromante X 4 by Luigi Ceccarelli; Organum III by Francesco Antonioni; Improvviso Statico III (2022) by Carmine Emanuele Cella; Alizarin by Alexander Khubeev; and Falling lights / Silence by Nicoletta Andreuccetti.

In 2022, the quartet released its first album, Koinè – Contemporary Italian Music for Saxophone Quartet (EmaVinci), featuring works by Francesco Antonioni, Sylvano Bussotti, Luigi Ceccarelli, Roberto Doati, Stefano Scodanibbio and Alessandro Solbiati, some of them recorded for the first time. The album documents a significant part of contemporary Italian writing for saxophone quartet, bringing together different compositional languages, timbral exploration and electronics.

The album received significant recognition from the specialist music press: it was included in the Top 5 Albums of the Year by Alias – Il Manifesto, in the annual selection of Percorsi Musicali, and in Blow Up Magazine’s 2022 Playlist. In his review for Blow Up, music critic Nazim Comunale described it as “A record that is literally a doorway to elsewhere.”

“Sidera Saxophone Quartet lives up to its name, both in the sense of reaching for stellar regions and in its truly outstanding excellence.” M. Gamba – Il Manifesto