“Ruisi’s rich, integrated tone, stripped of all but occasional vibrato, mines the tragedy of each work in a way that is singularly spellbinding.”
Big House, performed by the Ruisi Quartet, received an outstanding review in the May Issue of Gramophone.
“That close miking intensifies the ensemble’s deeply personal approach to this music. Leader Alessandro Ruisi phrases like a singer, pulling and stretching passages that Haydn conceived for his Esterházy concertmaster, Luigi Tomasini.
The Big House is the real thing: initially inspired by photographs of abandoned mansions in Leith’s native Ireland, it presents seven images linked in the composer’s mind to their pictorial titles. Leith revels in ‘blurry visions, hazy horizons … realness, rawness, scruffiness, roughness’ (Kate Molleson’s booklet note) and creates music whose bigness contains the very seeds of its own decay.“
David Threasher
You can read the full review HERE.
