Duo Robert Dick / Ursel Schlicht
Founded in 2004, the duo of flutist Robert Dick and pianist Ursel Schlicht seeks nothing less than
the redefinition of the flute and piano duo. Their music, integrating composition and improvisation,
radically expands the sound world and expressive possibilities of the traditional configuration.
New CD: The Galilean Moons
From the very beginning of the disc, without notice, the listener is thrown into the deep depths of improvisation caused by the incredible imagination and creative abilities of both instrumentalists.
The avant-garde actions of the American-German duo boldly expand the spectrum of jazz improvisation on the unusual atonal solutions and innovative experiments in the field of compositional texture.
Robert Ratajczak - Longplay Blog, May 2016
reviews
'The Galilean Moons' is full of unusual musical ideas, artfully realized.
Howard Mandel, Downbeat, 8/1/2016
'The Galilean Moons' will reward you with new and continuous sound twists never perceived listening earlier. That is, a must!
Sergio Eletto - Kathodik.it, August 2016
Challenging, exciting, interesting conversations, truly creative musicians, expanding the horizons of our understanding of music.
Leonid Auskern – JazzQuad, June 2016
The duo displays an intuitiveness that allows them to reach beyond mere free form conversations to achieve convincing collaborative statements. 'The Galilean Moons' is a four-movement suite that finds inspiration from the four moons of Jupiter – lo, Europa, Callisto and Ganymede. The musical contrasts of each movement create stunning imagery intended to mirror the physical contrasts of the four moons. Highlights include 'Europa', full of metallic harshness, and the floating enchantment heard on 'A Lingering Scent of Eden'.
John Vincent - Naked Music Blog, April 2016
So, the question is: why I decided to write about 'The Galilean Moons' after a week spent, on and off, with it? Perhaps the answer lies in a word: passion. Dick and Schlicht are two veterans who still like to play with the kind of fervency that almost forces a listener, even the casual one, to really take notice of the acoustic events. There’s no danger of remaining indifferent!
Massimo Ricci - Touching Extremes, September 2016
…lively chamber music, with sometimes echoes of world music. The four-part suite on 'The Galilean Moons' I liked most. Here Dick and Schlicht make the most extensive use of extended techniques in order to create intriguing and fascinating structures and textures.
DM - Vital Weekly
The four-movement suite co-composed by Dick and pianist Ursel Schlicht evokes, at times viscerally, the distinct physical environments found on each of Jupiter’s four moons. The five other works on this album assay a tremendously wide sonic and emotional vocabulary.
Andrew Timar - theWholeNOTE, September 2016
CD: Photosphere
"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
The photosphere may be thought of as the imaginary surface
from which the solar light that we see appears to be emitted.
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.