François Couturier, Tarkovsky Quartet

Nuit blanche is the third album by the Tarkovsky Quartet, the French-German group that pianist François Couturier named after the Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky. Its seventeen pieces explore the texture of dreams and memory, moving between composed chamber music, free improvisation, a baroque aria and an anonymous fifteenth-century song. Couturier has said that the silence and slowness of Tarkovsky are close to an ECM aesthetic. This record takes that idea further than its two predecessors, Nostalghia – Song for Tarkovsky and Tarkovsky Quartet.

The line-up is unchanged: Couturier on piano, Anja Lechner on cello, Jean-Marc Larché on soprano saxophone and Jean-Louis Matinier on accordion. The album was recorded in April 2016 at the Auditorio Stelio Molo of RSI in Lugano, with Stefano Amerio as engineer, and produced by Manfred Eicher. The booklet carries an essay by Carolin Emcke, and the cover photograph was taken by Tarkovsky himself.

Six short group improvisations, titled Rêve, Dream and Traum, run through the sequence. They use the instruments' other sounds: percussive pops from the saxophone, wiry slides on the cello, rattles and wheezes from the accordion. Between them stand longer pieces by Couturier. In Soleil sous la pluie the soprano plays high, close to flute range, over a faint knocking in the background. Urga, the longest track at over eleven minutes, starts from eerie cello tones that turn into a mournful melody shared with the accordion. In the title track the four instruments move around one another at a stately pace without crowding. Dakus is based on Nostalghia, the piece Toru Takemitsu wrote in memory of the director. Vivaldi's Cum dederit delectis suis somnum from the Nisi Dominus, arranged by the four players, recalls a composer Tarkovsky was listening to at the time of Stalker.

Peter Bacon of London Jazz News called it "modern cross-genre chamber music of the highest order" in 2017. In The Independent, Andy Gill heard the brief improvised dreams accrete "from wisps of sound and drones, like moths gathering at dusk around a light".

This is the CD edition, ECM 2524, first released on 7 April 2017, with a booklet essay by Emcke in German, French and English.