Georges Ivanovitch Gurdjieff, Vassilis Tsabropoulos, Anja Lechner

Chants, Hymns and Dances is a duo album by the German cellist Anja Lechner and the Greek pianist and composer Vassilis Tsabropoulos. It sets music by the Armenian-born philosopher and composer Georges Ivanovitch Gurdjieff (c.1877-1949) beside new pieces by Tsabropoulos based on Byzantine hymns. Gurdjieff drew on sacred and secular melodies of the Caucasus, the Middle East and Central Asia, and Tsabropoulos looks to the chant of the Orthodox church. The record moves freely between East and West, and between composition, arrangement and improvisation.

Gurdjieff's music reached paper through the composer Thomas de Hartmann, who wrote down and developed the melodies Gurdjieff sang or played to him in the 1920s. The results were piano pieces, and ECM had already released Keith Jarrett's Sacred Hymns drawn from them. Here Lechner and Tsabropoulos arranged eleven of them for cello and piano, the first time these pieces had been set for the two instruments. The album was recorded in December 2003 at the Festeburgkirche in Frankfurt am Main, with Markus Heiland as engineer and Manfred Eicher producing. Steve Lake wrote the liner notes.

The Gurdjieff pieces frame the programme, opening with Chant from a Holy Book and closing with a variation on it. Duduki and Assyrian Women Mourners come from Caucasian and Near Eastern folk models. As John Sunier noted in Audiophile Audition, the singing tone of the cello recalls that this music came from an oral, vocal tradition. At the centre stand Tsabropoulos's own works: three short pieces after Byzantine hymns, a Chant, and the eight-minute Dance, the longest track on the disc. Tsabropoulos, who studied at the Juilliard School, had already approached Byzantine hymns on his ECM solo album Akroasis.

Classic FM made it a CD of the month and Stereoplay gave it a Klangtipp. In Fanfare, Raymond Tuttle called the music "gravely beautiful through and through", pervaded by nostalgia without being saccharine. Neil Horner of MusicWeb International named Dance "the centrepiece of the disc". The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung heard the duo spinning fine threads between Occident and Orient.

This is the CD edition of ECM New Series 1888, first released in September 2004, with a running time of 72 minutes.