Flat Earth
Elektra String Quartet
Jacob Plooij & Mirka Rozmus, violin 1
Romano Crivici, violin 2
Rudi Crivici, viola
Markus hartstein, cello
Mark Atkins, didjeridu
Philip South, percussion
Steve Elphic, double bass
Works by: Romano Crivici
ABC Classics, 2001
Review:
“From a classical centre, this album blows genre boundaries away in a scorching set that is so ‘live’ it’s reinventing itself as it unfolds.
He has achieved something very rare here; the slash and burn of inspired improvisation coupled with the disciplined nuance-ing of cold-blooded, calculated composition. The themes (melody and harmony) are rich, mining major and minor veins simultaneously and sometimes capturing segments, in a sampler operated by a footswitch, in dense layers amid the nimble, charged interaction with percussion, didje and bass.
There are gorgeous spatial troughs- meandering piano and hand percussion, or solo violin and evocative atmospheric sections, strings bowed through effects. There is fragile beauty, tenderness, even romanticism in the tunes, and so they’re a universe apart from dry intellectual minimalism.
Five stars, this is a masterpiece of form and performance.”
Reviewed in Sound and Image, Leslie Sly