Album Review: Francois Couturier, Tarkovsky Quartet

Francois Couturier, Tarkovsky Quartet. Photo / Supplied

ECM's Tarkovsky Quartet has French pianist Francois Couturier returning with the third and final instalment of his musical love affair
with the films of Andrei Tarkovsky.

This Russian director, who died in 1986, was an important voice in contemporary cinema, through just a handful of features. Filmed with a technique he described as "sculpting in time", movies such as Solaris, The Mirror and Stalker were enterprising in use of music.

Tarkovsky's favoured composer, Eduard Atemyev, often went for startling cultural crossovers, melding the sounds of East and West. The director was also fond of turning to the classical masters with Bach being a central force in his 1972 Solaris.

All this is reflected in Couturier's soundscapes, played by a quartet that puts his piano alongside cello, accordion and soprano saxophone. Anja Lechner's cello may launch L'Apocalypse with a solo a la Bach, but the other instruments soon take the music into territory closer to a Piazzolla tango.

Eventually a jam in a stream-of-sonorities style nods to Couturier's background in the French free jazz movement. All four are superlative musicians, with the fifth star being producer Manfred Eicher who provides the luxuriously ambient setting. The album is permeated with echoes of older music and sometimes the musicians are specific in their sources.

The Quis est homo from Pergolesi's Stabat Mater is the inspiration behind the elegiac A celui qui a vu l'ange, its title taken from the inscription on Tarkovsky's gravestone.

A shorter track, La passion selon Andrei, takes its lead from the opening chorus of Bach's St John Passion. It is a tangle of mournful counterpoint, especially beautiful on the reedy accordion.

There is nostalgia here, but of the bracing kind. Doktor Faust is a reminder that the director always wanted to film the Thomas Mann novel and in this piece a Shostakovich Cello Sonata is eerily folded into the mix.

Perhaps the most poignant tribute is the image on the disc's cover, one of Tarkovsky's own polaroids, a glimpse of his homeland, taken from his holiday dacha, just before he moved to Europe.

Francois Couturier, Tarkovsky Quartet (ECM, through Ode Records)

Stars: 5/5

Verdict: "Noted French pianist at the helm of a poetic tribute to a great Russian cineaste." ECM's Tarkovsky Quartet has French pianist Francois Couturier returning with the third and final instalment of his musical love affair with the films of Andrei Tarkovsky.