"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,  Andrey Tarkovsky International InstituteStanding in the foreground is a musicality nourished at other wellsprings. Couturier, born near Orléans in 1950, has played with jazz musicians and is equally at home with avant-garde improvisers or oud player Anouar Brahem. Along the way, in various formations, he met Jean-Louis Matinier and Jean-Marc Larché. The cellist Anja Lechner moves just as freely across musical boundaries. She feels as closely attuned to Dino Saluzzi as to Misha Alperin or Gurdjieff, to whom she dedicated the moving Chants, Hymns and Dances... It is their attitude that has brought them together, not their backgrounds. --Konrad Heidkamp, writing in Die Zeit in 2006