On Moderato Cantabile, their 2013 duo recording, Anja Lechner and François Couturier illuminated some musical and spiritual affinities linking Komitas Vardapet, George I. Gurdjieff and Federico Mompou, composers at the crossroads of East and West. With Lontano, the German cellist and the French pianist widen the scope of their music. Out of their shared work – which has included concerts and recordings with the Tarkovsky Quartet and the Il Pergolese project as well as duo activities – a shared language has evolved. Whether playing their own pieces, compositions by Henri Dutilleux or Giya Kancheli or Anouar Brahem, drawing upon a Bach cantata or an Argentinean folk lament, Lechner and Couturier have established a distinctive musical identity. Finding atmospheric and expressive connections among far-flung sources, they also create new music that reflects and refracts its inspirations.

“It is to a true inner world that François Couturier and the Tarkovsky Quartet with Anja Lechner, Jean-Louis Matinier and Jean-Marc Larché give us a splendid access. Here are poetic ballads in which the voices of the piano, cello, accordion and saxophone rise up, answer one another, entwine, fade, and return... In which the pulse, like the beating of a heart, and the most imperceptible sounds sketch out a world in which the soul may soar with its entreaty and its dreams. Huge wings unfold, stretch out and close again. The image of dancers comes to mind. A whole protected interior space of long drawn out silences, in which, miraculously, improvisation remains sovereign. This is probably what brings us closest to the 'absolute freedom of the spiritual potential of man' which Andrei Tarkovsky regarded as the essential function of art.”
Charles H. de Brantes, Director of the Andrey Tarkovsky International Institute

 “Mixing classical rigour with improvisation both formal and free, what emerges is austerely beautiful, etched in sombre hues and redolent of an unslakeable thirst to connect with a deeper well of the spirit.”(Ray Comiskey, review on "Nostalghia" in the Irish Times)

Read more about the Tarkowsky Quartet album Nuit blanche

Trio Liberamente is an adventurous chamber group whose musical explorations freely traverse idioms, genres and continents. German cellist Anja Lechner and French pianist François Couturier have much shared experience in projects including a long-established duo, whose critically-acclaimed album Moderato Cantabile illuminated affinities between the music of Komitas, Mompou and Gurdjieff. For concerts in Gurdjieff’s 150th anniversary year, Lechner and Couturier were joined by Iranian clarinettist Mona Matbou Riahi; the success of the collaboration led ultimately to the formation of Trio Liberamente. All three players are sensitive interpreters and adroit improvisers. And, in their work together, they are alert to the ways in which the music of aural tradition and the languages of contemporary composition and free improvisation can converge at the crossroads of Orient and Occident.

Anja`s Solo repertory includes works of all time favorites like Bach, Tschaikovsky or Schumann but also contemporary masterminds like the astonishing armenian composer Tigran Mansurjan or russian genius Sofia Gubaidulina. Improvisation always takes an important part of Anja Lechners concerts.

Find out more about Anja Lechner.