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"This meeting of minds, intriguingly titled PHOTOSPHERE, joins Robert Dick and Ursel Schlicht, two virtuosi whose talent for stretching their instruments and minds allows them to paint with more colors and textures than flute and piano have any right to expect." Gene Santoro |
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New Release on Nemu Records : PHOTOSPHERE (Nemu 002)
recorded in concert at Kulturhaus Dock 4, Kassel
The Duo Robert Dick & Ursel Schlicht appeared at the WORLD MUSIC INSTITUTE'S "INTERPRETATIONS" series at MERKIN HALL, at NEW YORK UNIVERSITY, GREENWICH HOUSE MUSIC SCHOOL, SYMPOSIUM FUER AKTUELLE MUSIK KASSEL, and at KULTURHAUS DOCK 4 where the CD "PHOTOSPHERE" was recorded.
Booking:
BE1TWO / Jimi Wunderlich
phone: +49-30-6950 8100
fax: +49-30-6951 7717
info@be1two.net
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Robert Dick, improviser, composer, author, teacher and inventor -- is known worldwide for redefining the flute, creating revolutionary visions of its musical role. His music is rooted in free improvisation, new jazz, and classical music, contemporary and traditional. Dick has performed solo concerts throughout the Americas, Europe, Asia and Australia. He has released numerous solo recordings and performed and recorded with Ursel Schlicht, New Winds, Tambastics, Oscura Luminosa, the Soldier String Quartet, the A.D.D. Trio, King Chubby, Paul Giger, Jaron Lanier, Randy Raine-Reusch, Barry Guy, Mari Kimura, Klaus Kugel and many others. His grants, fellowships and commissions include a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Composer Fellowships, a Koussevitzky Foundation Commission, and two Meet the Composer commissions. His pedagogical works, including the book The Other Flute: A Performance Manual of Contemporary Techniques, are considered the standard bearers in their field. For the past quarter century, Dick has contributed to the evolution of the flute. Since the early 1990s Emerson Musical Instruments has produced the Robert Dick Model bass flute. He is presently collaborating with Brannen Brothers Flutemakers, the leading maker of fine flutes worldwide, in the production of his invention, the Glissando Headjoint®, which does for the flute what the whammy bar does for the electric guitar. |
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More from the Liner Notes by Gene Santoro: "A common pairing in classical music, flute-piano duos are rare in improvised music. But as they roam the territory between jazz, new music, and world music, Dick and Schlicht field a host of unusual sonics and techniques so startling that they open new panoramas. Over the last three decades, Dick has redefined the flute’s apparent limits musically and technically. He is a brilliant technician with seemingly effortless mastery of complex breathing, vocalizing, and overtones. Schlicht offers the perfect stimuli and counterpoints. At the piano, she has a quiver full of sharpened skills; she bows them with a sure hand aiming not for bravura but for the soul of each piece. She morphs her keyboards from muffled doom-laden clouds to note-bending koto; she’s as likely to play inside the box — the piano sound box, that is — as outside it at the keyboard. |
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LAPIS BLUES: Both delicate and forceful, with Dick’s flute etching runs and exhaling swirls against Schlicht’s empathetically prowling piano—when it doesn’t punctuate her thoughts as tuned percussion. EMERGENCE opens with heavily damped piano and breathy bass flute cavorting at the edge of whistling and periodically startled by jagged accents. The conversation unfolds from reflection to restlessness to rage to resolution. FAUST begins ominously, the piano lurking with large, angular steps alongside the dangerously capering, almost careening flute. The tempo accelerates into a dizzying eddy, and flute and piano dance a ballet of passion and power and human frailty in call and response that ends with the reprise of the fractured, leaping melody. PIECE IN GAMELAN STYLE: The pyrotechnics on this solo tour-de-force are no less devastating than Paganini’s or Hendrix’s. Dick’s circular breathing alone is a marvel. FRAGMENTS: The opening’s insistent spiky runs downshift into frenetic rumbles yielding to an urban soundscape, relentless, dazzling, edgy, seductive. Then Dick’s flute unfurls its all-too-human cry across the hurtling rhythms. PHOTOSPHERE is direct and intelligent in a world of posturing and yelling and spin and hype. It asks for your attention rather than demanding it. But those whose ears are open and whose spirits are willing will find ample reward." |
