1982
10 minutes

“Saphir” may be played by students of rather high level.
This piece, the piano part of which must produce a reverberating halo, had its first performance at the Sèvres Conservatory on 22 April 1983, with Max Jézouin, saxophone, and Claude Jean, piano.

In this music, one can perceive two types of writing:
- one insisting on the preciseness of sounds in term of pitches and rhythmical durations.
- the other one dealing with the particularities of the Saxophone so well described by Jean-Marie Londeix who speaks of : “the variety and the flexibility of its dynamic possibilities, the variety of its tone quality and the diversity of its type of attack, its astonishing facility in playing extremely wide intervals, in playing outside of the tempered scale, in playing multiphonic sounds, harmonics” and so on.

At beginning the two universes of sounds (wind and keyboard) alternate. Then they join and echo each other.
A baritone saxophone cadenza follows ending with participation of the piano. This passage leads to a climactic point which concludes the work.

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