Chartres is the first record Swiss violinist Paul Giger made for ECM New Series: a solo violin played at night inside Chartres Cathedral, shaped as a walk through the building. Giger saw in its proportions a musical order, a kind of visible Dorian scale as used in Gregorian chant. The five pieces follow the medieval pilgrim from the crypt to the labyrinth, across the church and on to the Holy Center.

Born in 1952, Giger began the violin at eight and later travelled through Asia as a street musician. He graduated from the Bern Conservatory in 1980 and spent three years as a first violinist in St. Gallen before going freelance in 1983. The album was recorded in the crypt and upper church on two nights around the summer solstice of 1988, between one and five in the morning. Manfred Eicher produced and Peter Drefahl engineered.

Each piece was recorded in the part of the building that gives it its name, so the acoustic shifts from the close crypt to the long decay of the nave. Crypt I+II starts almost from a breath, the bow near the bridge, until a hymn-like chromatic melody emerges. Labyrinth opens as a fast fiddle dance and turns into a lament, with Giger striking the fingerboard and tapping the strings with the bow. Crossing, over 22 minutes long, climbs through the registers while the reverberation piles up harmonies, and modal lines close to plainchant sit beside raga and folk figures. In Holy Center the violin settles on a single pitch that seems to belong to the room.

Gramophone wrote that the music "draws life from the building in every way" and that Giger "far outclasses many concert violinists" in technical control. In Hi-Fi Review, Peter Herring called it "musical, not mystical" and "A rare experience." The record set the course of Giger's later ECM work, from Alpstein with Jan Garbarek and Pierre Favre to the solo Schattenwelt (1993) and ars moriendi (2022).

This is the CD edition, ECM New Series 1386 (837 752-2), first released in 1989 on CD and LP, recorded digitally at the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Chartres. All compositions are by Paul Giger.