Anja Lechner
François Couturier
Lontano

Anja Lechner violoncello
François Couturier piano
Recorded October 2019, Sendesaal Bremen
Engineer: Christoph Franke
Cover photo: Erieta Attali
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: October 16, 2020

On Lontano, the cello of Anja Lechner and the piano of François Couturier play the roles of scenery and camera. As the lens bends the light into a discernible image yet changes that image in the process of fixing it within a frame, Couturier funnels Lechner’s sunbeams laden with stories that can only be heard with the eyes (and vice versa). If such a description seems too cerebral or even bogus, it’s only because the music it seeks to capture doesn’t accompany it. Even “capture” feels like an inappropriate word to interpret the relationships being explored by this symbiotic duo, especially when one considers that the music is half improvised and slips through the pores of any enclosure that surrounds it. Echoes reveal themselves to have been in the air they breathe all along, thus nullifying categorization as a political shadow that has no business casting itself here.

If the “Praeludium” tells us anything, it’s that awakening in this scenario can only take place when there is both sun and dew. Otherwise, the dawn might have nothing to kiss as it peers over the not-so-distant mountaintops. In so much of what follows, the inverted images in those pinhead orbs find themselves repeated in blissful aberration. Whether in the churning sediments of “Solar I” and “Solar II” or the flowering “Triptych” for two, there is a sense of agitation beneath the surface. The deepest point of these dialogues is mined in “Gratitude,” where Lechner skims the edges of notes as if to welcome melodic wanderers just long enough to feed and clothe them before sending them back into the wilderness, listless and without instruction until an ear catches them again—maybe tomorrow, maybe a millennium beyond.

That which is composed is carefully torn and folded from the pages of life itself. With each new crease, once-distant letters cohere into a new language. Among these homages, Anouar Brahem’s “Vague – E la nave va” inspires an astonishing piece of aural cinema, a tracking shot that shows us a wall and glimpses of the victims on the other side of it. The sensitivity of Henri Dutilleux’s “Prélude en berceuse,” too, reveals a pathway to revival, where awaits the closing door of the “Postludium.” Like the “Memory of a Melody,” which threads an excerpt from the Bach cantata aria “Wie zittern und wanken der Sünder Gedanken” (BWV 105) through the needle of the here and now, it reminds us that all melodies are memories.

Lontano is, above all, most wondrous for standing as a corrective to the phrase “effortless execution.” Tempting as this descriptor is, I find evidence of the untold hours of patient corporeal shaping and experience that feed every note. A flow like the one preserved here is made possible only by the sacrifices that dug its trenches.