Quartet Sigma Project

“Is it really necessary to introduce SIGMA Project in 2020? The vast quantity of concerts the group has performed during its ten-year trajectory, mainly in Europe and Latin America, the number of works commissioned during that time period, and its participation in eight albums ratify its remarkable role as one of the busiest Spanish groups and as an ambassador of newly created music.” - Joseì Luis Besada, IRCAM/Strasbourg University

"Magnificently accurate, inventive, and awe-inspiring performance of SIGMA Project, from Spain. I thought this sort of precision could only come from a string quartet.” - Irvine Arditti (June 2017, Mexico City)

SIGMA Project or, in other words, the combined talents of Andreìs Gomis, Ángel Soria, Alberto Chaves, and Josetxo Silguero, is more than a saxophone quartet. It is a crucial conduit for the instrumental music of the 21st century. If the string quartet was the quintessential chamber music formation in past centuries, SIGMA Project claims that role for the saxophone quartet in the 21st century.

SIGMA Project, actual ‘Ardittis’ of the saxophone (named as such by Scherzo magazine) gives concerts in auditoriums and festivals halfway across the world: in the United States of America, Jamaica, Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, Chile, Germany, France, Scotland, England, Italy, Poland, Romania, Croatia and Tunisia, as well as in its own circuit in Spain.
During its 10th anniversary international tour in 2018, the BBVA Foundation acknowledged SIGMA Project's excellence by awarding the quartet the prestigious Leonardo Grant for Researchers and Musical Creators.

SIGMA Project’s members see themselves as creative explorers that manage to stimulate the composers who approach their sound, generating new grammars in a real sound laboratory such as the symphonic-concert projects developed with the winners of the Spanish National Music Prize Luis de Pablo and Félix Ibarrondo or the monographic cycles created together with Alberto Posadas (Poética del Laberinto) and José María Sánchez-Verdú (KHÔRA).

This dynamic of search and research has been crystalizing for years in the strong relationship between SIGMA PROJECT and Ernst Von Siemens Musikstiftung, from Germany. This has favored the premiere of works by composers such as Manuel Hidalgo (Spain), Simone Movio (Italy), Roberto Sierra (Puerto Rico), Raphael Cendo (France), Hilda Paredes (Mexico) and Liza Lim (Australia). More than 50 world premieres have been carried out so far by composers as renowned as José Manuel López López, Jesús Torres, Ramon Lazkano, Héctor Parra, Sergio Blardony, José Luis Torá, Alberto Bernal (Spain), Georgina Derberz, Javier Torres-Maldonado, Víctor Ibarra, Arturo Fuentes, Iván Naranjo, Hebert Vazquez (Mexico), Miguel Farías (Chile), Mª Eugenia Luc (Argentina) or Yair Klartag (Israel) and first performances in Spain by Sofía Gubaidulina, Salvatore Sciarrino, Peter Eötvös, George Friedrich Haas or Hugues Dufourt.

SIGMA Project has its own record label, Sigmarecords, and has edited the CD Utopías: New Music for Saxophone Quartet and the DVD The Music for saxophone by Félix Ibarrondo. Additionally, they have recorded for the BBVA Foundation (José Manuel López López and Gerardo Gombau monographs), Orpheus Classical (María Eugenia Luc monograph), Casa Velázquez-Académie de France in Madrid (Víctor Ibarra monograph) and, invited by the German Foundation Ernst Von Siemens Musikstiftung and with the label Col Legno, the Simone Movio monograph. In 2019 they start a fruitful collaboration with the prestigious German label WERGO, publishing the cycle Poética del Laberinto (monographic Alberto Posadas) and the cycle KHÔRA (monographic José M. Sánchez-Verdú).

SIGMA Project’s international activity is supported by the National Institute of Performing Arts and Music of the Spanish Ministry of Culture, the Etxepare Basque Institute of the Culture Department of the Basque Government and the German Foundation Ernst Von Siemens.

 “If I had to summarize the personality of the saxophone quartet SIGMA Project in two words, I would not hesitate: originality and perfection. It is a pleasure, a joy, to share music with them. They communicate music, they give it life.” - Luis de Pablo (National Music Award, Spain)

With Andrés Gomis, Josetxo Silguero, Ángel Soria, Alberto Chaves

Photo credit: Michal Novak