Flat Earth​

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Elektra String Quartet

Jacob Plooij & Mirka Rozmus, violin 1

Romano Crivici, violin 2

Rudi Crivici, viola

Markus hartstein, cello

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Mark Atkins, didjeridu

Philip South, percussion

Steve Elphic, double bass

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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.

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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.”

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Reviewed in Sound and Image, Leslie Sly