New Improvisations by Lechner and Couturier

Anja Lechner and François Couturier (photograph by Lolo Vasco, courtesy of ECM Records)

This past October ECM released a new album featuring two of the members of the Tarkovsky Quartet. The album, entitled Lontano, consists of fourteen relatively short tracks performed by the quartet’s founder, pianist François Couturier, and its cellist Anja Lechner. Improvisation is at the heart of all the tracks on this album, several of which are listed as joint compositions, while, on other tracks, one of the two of them provides the point of departure. A few of the tracks involve reflections on other composers, including Johann Sebastian Bach, Henri Dutilleux, Giya Kancheli, and Ariel Ramirez. There is also one track, “Tryptic,” which seems to involve Couturier haunted by the ghost of Maurice Ravel, who is, in turn, haunted by the ghost of François Couperin.

Couturier has his own particular command of a rhetoric of stillness. This may well have emerged from his interest in the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, most of which involve a dream-like detachment from both space and time that requires considerable patience on the part of the viewer. This is a disposition that has served Manfred Eicher well in the many albums that he has produced on the ECM label. The tracks for Lontano were recorded in October of 2019, affirming that Eicher’s aesthetic stance is as firmly planted in this “rhetoric of stillness” as it has been for several decades.

This time, however, that rhetorical stance had to contend with a major change in world-view that took place this past March. Around the world major performance venues had to face the imposition of shelter-in-place orders. A “brave new world” emerged in which performers could draw upon the Internet to continue their work; but the very nature of performance no longer involved those performers sharing physical space with their audiences. For some this involved new approaches to creativity, which often involved reflecting on that detachment. Readers may recall that, when Summit Records released its Inside album of music by Scott Routenberg, my own reaction was to push back against such reflections when they were based on “a uniform rhetoric of blandness.”

While I would not accuse Couturier and Lechner of such blandness, I would still argue that their rhetoric does not always stimulate the beneficial aspects of “positive thinking.” Mind you, their two-part double improvisation “Solar” is refreshingly energetic in the context of the other fourteen tracks on Lontano. Nevertheless, under prevailing conditions, I would have preferred a bit more of that vigorous stimulation. Of course the musicians could not have anticipated the value of such stimulation when they recorded their tracks a year before the album was released. However, the subsequent twist of time has not served them (or, for that matter, Eicher) very well; and, as a result, I will probably not return to any of their albums until I feel that I have not only emerged from the current tunnel but put a generous distance from it behind me.