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. Couturier’s Dakus, for instance, acknowledges a debt to Toru Takemitsu’s 1987 composition Nostalghia, written in memory of the director. The quartet also incorporates a crepuscular interpretation of Vivaldi’s “Cum dederit delectis suis somnum” from the Nisi Dominus, alluding to a composer Tarkovsky was listening to at the time of Stalker. Whether playing improvised chamber music, modern composition or baroque music, the creative originality of the Tarkovsky Quartet shines through.
