Anja Lechner, François Couturier

CD version. Lontano is the second duo album by German cellist Anja Lechner and French pianist François Couturier, six years after Moderato Cantabile. Where that record centred on music by Komitas, George Gurdjieff and Federico Mompou, this one gives far more room to improvisation. Its sixteen pieces, many of them short, move between original compositions and free duets. Beside them sit interpretations of Henri Dutilleux, Giya Kancheli and Anouar Brahem, a Bach cantata and an Argentine folk lament.

Lechner and Couturier have shared a long road, most visibly in Couturier's Tarkovsky Quartet, inspired by the films of Andrei Tarkovsky. Lechner, trained as a classical cellist, has also played in the Rosamunde Quartett and in a long duo with bandoneonist Dino Saluzzi. Lontano was recorded in October 2019 at the Sendesaal Bremen, with Christoph Franke as engineer and Manfred Eicher as producer.

Eight pieces are credited to the two players together, and the line between composed and improvised is often hard to hear, as in the brief, spontaneous Solar I and Solar II. Memory of a Melody grows from an aria in Johann Sebastian Bach's cantata Herr, gehe nicht ins Gericht mit deinem Knecht. In Ariel Ramírez's zamba Alfonsina y el mar the bowed cello carries the vocal line over soft piano contours. Couturier's Flow lets the roles shift, with Lechner's arco lines telling the story before the piano takes the lead over gently plucked strings.

The album drew warm notices on both sides of the jazz and classical divide. For Karl Lippegaus on Deutschlandfunk the jazz pianist and the classical cellist bring their two worlds together in a subtle fusion that rarely succeeds this well. In JazzTimes Thomas Conrad described it as "inner-directed jazz, meticulous as chamber music," adding that "for the jazz audience, the revelation will be Lechner." Graham Spry of London Jazz News heard "a kind of spiritual yearning that is sometimes achingly beautiful, sometimes disconcertingly discordant," and singled out Brahem's Vague as perhaps the most delightful track.

CD edition, ECM 2682, released in October 2020, with liner notes by Lechner, Couturier and Stéphane Ollivier.