ABBA

Arranger, cellist, conductor and teacher who led the Saskatoon Symphony Orchestra and the Saskatoon Youth Orchestra and helped premiere Charles Ives’ Aeschylus and Sophocles at L.A.’s Wilshire Ebell Chamber Music Hall on 2^nd April 1951.

In the 1960s, he was busy with the South Bay Chamber Music Society, Inc., performing several concerts in 1964, much of their repertoire consisting of Classical composers such as Beethoven, Mozart, and Schubert. Five years later, he returned to the SBCMS, this time as a member of the Lyric Arts String Quartet, in a program ranging from Franz Joseph Haydn to 20^th-century American composer, Samuel Barber.

As an arranger, he re-worked Johann Michael Haydn’s “Trio No. 1 in G” into a wind quintet, and boiled down Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s “Valse sentimentale” for cello and piano. A performance of this latter work can be heard on the Nathaniel Rosen/Doris Stevenson 1994 release, Orientale.

There are a couple of opportunities to hear Alexander on CD, one being Doris Day’s Que Sera Sera and the other being Frank Sinatra’s 1979 boxed set, Trilogy.

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