“A musician full of curiosity to explore the full potential of her instrument.”
CLASSIC FM
Amy Dickson is a British and Australian saxophonist based in London. A Fellow of the Royal College of Music and Visiting Professor of Saxophone at Codarts in Rotterdam, she performs on both soprano and alto saxophone, with orchestras and in recital. Twice nominated for a Grammy Award, she has recorded eight solo albums for Sony Music, and her project The Solo Sessions gathered twenty nine new works for solo saxophone. She has commissioned composers throughout her career, and in 2015 she founded Take a Breath, a breathing awareness programme that teaches relaxed breathing to primary school children.
Amy Dickson is devoted to the existing repertoire of the saxophone, performing the concertos of Glazunov, Larsson and Dubois, Ibert’s Concertino da camera, Debussy’s Rhapsodie, Villa Lobos’s Fantasia, Milhaud’s Scaramouche, Frank Martin’s Ballade, Giya Kancheli’s Night Prayers and Escapades, John Williams’s concert work drawn from his score for the film Catch Me If You Can. She made her concerto debut at sixteen with the Dubois Concerto, and on her eighteenth birthday recorded Dubois’s Divertissement with John Harding and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.
“Dickson shows the saxophone is capable of subtlety and great beauty.”
BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE
In 2007 she transcribed Philip Glass’s Violin Concerto No. 1 for soprano saxophone, with the blessing of the composer, and recorded it with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. It was released in 2009 on an album alongside Michael Nyman’s Where the Bee Dances, composed for the saxophone, and John Tavener’s The Protecting Veil, which she also transcribed.
She recorded Richard Rodney Bennett’s Seven Country Dances with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, released in 2011. Her performance of This Land from Hans Zimmer’s The Lion King, with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, appears on the Sony Classical album Hans Zimmer: The Classics.
Richard Blackford’s Pietà, a setting of the Stabat Mater for soloists, choirs, strings and solo saxophone, was recorded in 2019 and toured extensively to rave reviews.
“Amy Dickson, whose alto and soprano sax playing in, respectively, Glazunov’s Concerto and Kancheli’s Night Prayers, was so warm, so sublimely mellifluous and expressive, it would have melted stone.”
THE HERALD
She has dedicated her career to commissioning new music and expanding the repertoire of the saxophone. In 2018 she gave the world premiere of James MacMillan’s Saxophone Concerto with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and Joseph Swensen, and in 2019 of Matthew Hindson’s Soprano Saxophone Concerto with the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra. Her long collaboration with Ross Edwards produced Full Moon Dances in 2012 and the double concerto Frog and Star Cycle, premiered with Colin Currie and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra at the Sydney Opera House in 2016. Peter Sculthorpe’s Island Songs, which gave its title to her recording with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, remains central to her repertoire. Martin Butler’s Concerto for Soprano Saxophone, commissioned for the 2009 Presteigne Festival, was premiered by her there, and she recorded it during the pandemic with the Presteigne Festival Orchestra and George Vass, on the album Presteigne Premieres.