Cul de Sac — CANCELED
A piano recital, also published as an LP.
“His expressive concentration at the keyboard is worthy of Sviatoslav Richter broaching a Beethoven sonata. Yet irony pervades the late-flowering romanticism and spumy surges of the opening movement of this solo excursion. An anachronism, like Don Quixote rewritten by Pierre Menard in the well-known story by Jorge Luis Borges, a faithful replica but out of joint with its time. Croene has put a deconstructed piano through its paces on a previous release, yet here the reconstituted instrument beckons to its own golden age. On the sleeve he identifies his own striving for virtuosity as a symptom of yearning for lost accord with the natural world. The second movement finds such nostalgia dispersed through cycles of languid repetition, while the third steers his diminished creative drive towards a conceptual dead end.” — The Wire