Anja Lechner & François Couturier
Lontano
The musical kinship between Anja Lechner and François Couturier is well-known and amply documented, thanks to their joint concerts and their recordings for ECM Records. Whilst their successful duo project Moderato Cantabile oscillated between Orient and Occident, the German cellist and the French pianist now cover a wide range of music with their new programme Lontano – always on the search for familiar melodies by Henri Dutilleux, Giya Kancheli, Anouar Brahem and Johann Sebastian Bach, for example, that have already accompanied them for a long time and leave them enough scope for improvisation and individual adaptations. The new compositions written by François Couturier for the duo move between their improvisations and free interpretations like a connecting counterpoint.
Anja Lechner is one of the German music scene‘s most versatile artists. Classically trained on the cello, she is open to all kinds of very different collaborations in the areas of classical as well as improvised music. Together with Jean-Marc Larché, Jean-Louis Matinier and François Couturier, she founded the much-lauded Tarkovsky Quartet in 2006.
The pianist and composer François Couturier is also classically trained, but already performed with John McLaughlin as early on as in 1981. Numerous collaborations with French jazz musicians as well as the Tunisian oud player Anouar Brahem followed.
