Inside the Music: Trio Vivo - Classical Music by an Uncommon Ensemble

Lucy Banner - Mariellen Sears - Bruce Abbott

In the fall of 2015 I contacted two Cape Cod-based musicians I had long admired - pianist Lucy Banner and flutist Mariellen Sears - to see if they might be interested in meeting for a session to play some classical repertoire. A date was set, and at the end of that very exciting first session Lucy and Mariellen asked if we were all available to meet the following week. Trio Vivo was born! For the next seven years we continued to rehearse weekly and to perform regularly in concert. We described our style as "Classical Music by an Uncommon Ensemble".

In October 2018 we released a recording entitled "Uncommon" featuring music we had been performing in our concerts. 

Compared to other instruments there is not a lot of classical music composed for saxophone. To alleviate that we saxophonists take music that has been composed for other instruments - such as oboe, violin, viola, cello, French horn - and adapt it for saxophone. For example, the first three tracks on the album, Amuse-bouches by Gary Schocker, is composed for flute, oboe and piano. I am playing the oboe part on soprano saxophone.

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Click the image below to explore the Trio Vivo: Uncommon album on YouTube.
​Free to listen, no account or subscription required.

Also available on Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple Music, 
Pandora, and all streaming platforms.
Click here for audio CD information.