CD ECM Records Tarkovsky Quartet: Nuit Blanche

2011

Francois Couturier - pian
Anja Lechner - violoncel
Jean-Louis Matinier - acordeon
Jean-Marc Larche - saxofon sopran

Ingmar Bergman once said of Andrey Tarkovsky, “He moves with such naturalness in the room of dreams,” and the French-German quartet named after the great Russian filmmaker has developed an associative dream-language of its own. For leader and pianist François Couturier the “silence and slowness of Tarkovsky” are closely related to an “ECM aesthetic” further developed on the group’s third album Nuit blanche, produced by Manfred Eicher in Lugano in April 2016. Here pieces variously composed by François Couturier, or created in the moment by Couturier, cellist Anja Lecher, saxophonist Jean-Marc Larché and accordionist Jean-Louis Matinier, explore the texture of dreams and memory and continue to make oblique reference to Tarkovsky. Whether playing improvised chamber music, modern composition or baroque music, the creative originality of the Tarkovsky Quartet shines through.

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A distinctive palette whose drones and small, fluting phrases recall the likes of Pauline Oliveiros and Terry Riley, as in the immersive piano/sax blend of ‘Fantasia’. Couturier’s “Urga” is a reflective dérive through deserted streets of memory, while ‘Dakus’ features urgent, sweeping cello over pulsing accordion. The whole album, meanwhile, is ingeniously bound together by a series of six short, improvised ‘dreams’ – two each of ‘Rêve’, ‘Dream’ and ‘Traum’ – which accrete gently from wisps of sound and drones, like moths gathering at dusk around a light.
Andy Gill, The Independent

The music is as subtly strange and delicately dream-like as Tarkovsky’s films and this disc has brief, fully improvised and especially abstract pieces running through it as well as longer, more formal compositions by Couturier, a bit of Vivaldi and an anonymous piece from the 15th century. […] The group improvs, named Rêve, Dream or Traum, sometimes make more use of the other sounds the instruments can make, whether it is percussive pops from the saxophone, wiry slides from the cello or rattling and wheezing from the accordion. Their unplanned nature makes them even more dreamlike in their unexpected twists and incongruities. […] Modern cross-genre chamber music of the highest order, and full of mystery which has the listener finding new things with every play of the disc.
Peter Bacon, London Jazz News