Musician
Judith Saxton’s years of experience performing around the globe infuses both her music-making, and all she touches. Her symphonic career, like much of her musical life, is international and includes concertos with 10 orchestras where she has been their principal player and guest soloist with a number of bands and brass bands.
In her first full-time orchestral position as principal with the Hong Kong Philharmonic for three seasons, she performed orchestra, opera, and ballet, was soloist for the Shostakovich Piano Concerto for Trumpet and Strings with Dmitri Alexeev, and worked with a panoply of conductors from around the globe.
Her improvisational abilities have allowed her to trade jazz solos with guest artists in front of orchestras, work in a jazz quintet on the QE2 ocean liner, perform several seasons in a society band, solo with the UNCSA jazz band, perform with the UNCSA Jazz Septet and work as a studio musician making Proctor & Gamble commercials. She has spent a season with Music Theater Wichita and performed many more musical runs both here and abroad.
Whether in an opera pit in Hong Kong, Chicago, North Carolina, or touring with Mannheim Steamroller on their Midwest or Southeast tour, with a brass quartet for years of GIA publication recordings, on seven Japan tours with the Sierra Brass Quintet, or joining with the All-Star Monarch Brass Ensemble or all-women Trompettes Soniques, whether touring Kansas with the Wichita Brass Quintet, or performing live on Finnish Radio with the Lieksa Brass week, her career has taken her to stages and cities around the globe.
She has performed across the Soviet Union with the American Soviet Youth Orchestra, concertized in Brasil with Musica Harmonia, Regent Hall in London, UK, and for the Central and Shanghai Conservatories in China. Judith was guest principal for the St. Louis Symphony for music-director led subscription concerts and performed with Daniel Barenboim and Pierre Boulez as a sub/extra with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. She has given world-premieres on two occasions at Carnegie Hall with two different orchestras. She has just as importantly presented in the inner-city Chicago schools with both the Chicago Symphony Brass Quintet and Whirlwind Brass Trio. As both a musician and educator, she has been privileged to have a front seat to music’s impact on the lives of thousands of young students around the world through in-school brass quintet and Orchestra Young Person’s concerts.
She looks forward to bringing music to peoples of all ages, both far and wide, using her gifts in service of education, self-agency, and community building.
