Tarkovsky Quartet

The group heard here is comprised of three French musicians – Couturier, Larché, Matinier – who have worked together frequently in shared projects, plus German cellist Anja Lechner. A member of the Rosamunde Quartet whose ECM recordings include performances of compositions by Mansurian, Silvestrov, Shostakovich, Webern, Haydn and more (including, most recently Thomas Larcher) Lechner is also versed in improvisation in different traditions, working with musicians from Dino Saluzzi to Misha Alperin. In 2004, with Vassilis Tsabropoulos, she recorded music of Gurdjieff (“Chants, Hymns and Dances”), a project with historic-philosophical links to the present disc: Tarkovsky’s “Andrei Rublev” was Gurdjieff-inspired.

François Couturier was born in Fleury-les-Aubrais, near Orléans, in 1950, and began playing piano at the age of six. After completing studies in classical music and musicology in the early 1970s, he began improvising in earnest, initially taking his cue from modernists P...