The unique band founded by François Couturier continues to draw inpiration from the films of Andrey Tarkovsky as its frame of reference expands. Allusions to Pergolesi, Bach and Shostakovich are to be found in the compositions here, as are compelling group improvisations. As the Irish Times wrote of the earlier “Nostalghia – Song for Tarkovsky” album (recorded 2005): “Mixing classical rigour with improvisation both formal and free, what emerges is austerely beautiful, etched in sombre hues and redolent of an unslakeable thirst to connect with a deeper well of the spirit.”
BACKGROUND:
“It is to a true inner world that François Couturier and the Tarkovsky Quartet with Anja Lechner, Jean-Louis Matinier and Jean-Marc Larché give us a splendid access. Here are poetic ballads in which the voices of the piano, cello, accordion and saxophone rise up, answer one another, entwine, fade, and return… In which the pulse, like the beating of a heart, and the most imperceptible sounds sketch out a world in which the soul may soar with its entreaty and its dreams. Huge wings unfold, stretch out and close again. The image of dancers comes to mind. A whole protected interior space of long drawn out silences, in which, miraculously, improvisation remains sovereign. This is probably what brings us closest to the ‚absolute freedom of the spiritual potential of man‘ which Andrei Tarkovsky regarded as the essential function of art.”
Charles H. de Brantes, Director of the Andrey Tarkovsky International Institute
