Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky rarely used music in his films, but that didn't stop French pianist François Couturier from writing a musical appreciation, writes Ray Comiskey.
The great Russian film director, Andrei Tarkovsky, died 21 years ago in exile, all too soon, aged 54. Politically suspect in his pre-Glasnost, pre-Perestroika homeland, he left behind only seven feature films, each the product of a deeply spiritual sensibility, and a reputation as one of the true masters of the cinema, part poet and part philosopher.
He always claimed that his movies weren't difficult; even a child could appreciate them. A child might be defeated by their hypnotic slowness, like the long take of the pool scene in Nostalghia, or the metaphysics of Mirror, Stalkerand The Sacrifice, and the emotional and psychic ambiguities of Solaris, yet you can see what he meant. What's there to understand? Just trust your emotions and instincts, he seems to say, and let them take you into the world of his films.
It's something that the classically trained French pianist François Couturier had in mind when he began to write the music that became Nostalghia - Song for Tarkovsky, now out on the ECM label. A longtime fan of the director, he's meticulous in his answers, but not without a sense of humour; at one point, he apologised, amid general laughter - his wife was translating - that he had to deal with an obstreperous parrot who wanted a slice of the action.
His interest goes back to when he first saw Andrei Rublev, Tarkovsky's reflection on a spiritual quest for the light, centred allegorically on the wanderings of the eponymous medieval Russian icon painter. Since that first encounter, Couturier has gone time and again to see the films of a man he regards as "one of the greatest artists of the century, in any art form".
"It's not an intellectual cinema," he says. "You have to let yourself go with all your senses awakened and let the images come to you. Just free yourself to a direct aesthetic sensation. Each movie is a particular and specific universe. Ingmar Bergman [ the great Swedish director who died recently] says that Tarkovsky is the greatest; 'he moves inside the space of dreams and doesn't explain anything.' "
THERE ARE CONSTANTthemes; characters are in some kind of spiritual and emotional crisis, on a journey in search of some higher truth. In Stalker, they venture into the shifting dangers of the Zone, a region devastated by a celestial visitor, a meteorite, 20 years before. They're trying to reach the Room, a rumoured place where your deepest wish may be granted. In Nostalghia, an exiled Russian writer, trying to slake his spiritual thirst, rejects the temptations of the flesh and, in the long pool sequence, fights, literally and metaphorically, against the dying of the light.
Isn't all this a profoundly Christian, even Hindu, idea? That our souls cannot rest until they rest in God, yet the journey is always somehow unresolved, as in both those movies?
"Tarkovsky was a very religious man," Couturier agrees, "and creating movies was a way for him to make a religious observance. But in Stalker, you feel that his religion was not Christian orthodoxy. It was also a mix of all kinds of religious beliefs, including Oriental ones, of course.
"What's interesting in Tarkovsky's films, especially in Stalker, is not only the religious dimension, but also the fact that it's completely particular, like the creation of another world, with different lights and different sounds, and the expression of feelings, which is done in a very different way from what we have seen anywhere else."
Ironically, considering his films provided the inspiration for Couturier's music, Tarkovsky used very little music in them and even said it was his "personal conviction that film doesn't need music at all". So why did Couturier decide to make a musical response to all this?
"I wanted to pay a humble tribute to Tarkovsky. What I didn't want to do was illustrate his movies. So what I did is not an illustrative music, but a collection of diverse emotions related more or less to Tarkovsky's work.
"You mentioned my response. I didn't really mean to respond to the films. What I tried to do was to create a musical universe which pays tribute to the genius of Tarkovsky. In fact, you don't need to know Tarkovsky's movies to appreciate - or not appreciate - the music, but to listen to it."
Why did he pick the name Nostalghiafor the project? "For Tarkovsky," he answers, "nostalgia is both a longing for the homeland and more for the fullness of life. He wrote 'art is nostalgia for the ideal' and I chose this title because Nostalghiais, with Stalker, one of my favourite films, and also because it is an Italian word that you use in English, right? But Tarkovsky added an 'h' to it, to make it a completely made-up word. I like that, and it makes the Italian word sound Russian, which is very poetic. I talked with Tarkovsky's son about it, which is why I'm so certain it was invented. It doesn't exist in Russian."
Deciding on the musicians for the project was relatively easy. Couturier has had a trio for many years with the soprano saxophonist Jean-Marc Larché, and the accordionist Jean-Louis Matinier. (Both Couturier and Matinier were here last year with Anouar Brahem, the wonderful Tunisian oud player; the oud is a kind of lute.) So there was a strong musical and personal relationship already in place.
Needing something to fill the lower register and give the music more "bottom", he thought at first about bass clarinet, then cello, which is where Anja Lechner, the superb cellist who works in both classical and in more folk-oriented fields, came in.
"For the type of musical discourse I had in mind, I needed musicians with high technical qualities, because it was especially difficult to orchestrate, particularly how to adjust the cello register with the saxophone's register. So Jean-Marc and Anja both have this direct link to Western classical music, which I needed. But also the three of them, including Jean-Louis, are musicians who can improvise."
WHEN THEY CAMEto record the CD for Manfred Eicher's ECM label, the music combined both the formally structured and the freely improvised. "It's not all improvisation. But Manfred," he adds with a laugh, "he likes that a lot.
"We kept two of them on the CD, Solaris Iand Solaris II. While we were playing them, I thought particularly of the specific atmosphere of Solaris and tried to communicate my emotions to the other musicians.
"Also, the CD's structure is very important. It starts and ends with a piece referenced to Bach's St Matthew Passion." These are Le Sacrificeand L'éternel retour, both inspired by "Erbarme Dich" from that work; they directly echo the film The Sacrifice, which has the same theme at the beginning and at the end. There are other classical links; both Nostalghiaand Andreirefer to the third movement of Schnittke's Sonata No 1 for cello and piano.
Particularly touching is another classical link, to Pergolesi's Stabat Mater, a beautiful work which, Couturier admits, moves him very deeply. He drew on it for Toliu, named after Tarkovsky's affectionate nickname for Anatoli Solonitsyn, his favourite actor.
"He was a big friend of Tarkovsky's," he says, "and his death was a huge trauma for him. If Solonitsyn hadn't died, Tarkovsky would have given him all those roles he gave to Erland Josephson - whom I like a lot, too. And Pergolesi was one of Tarkovsky's favourite composers."
There are other pieces with specific dedications; Crépusculaire, for the way the great Swedish cinematographer Sven Nykvist, who died not long ago, played with light and colour; Nostalghia, to Tonino Guerra, Tarkovsky's screenwriter and co-scenarist on that movie; Stalker, to Eduard Artemiev, the Russian composer who wrote the music for Stalker, Mirrorand Solaris; and L'éternel retour, to Erland Josephson, who appeared in The Sacrificeand Nostalghia.
But these are essentially dedications, and not all of them are strictly germane to the music itself. "Overall," he says, "in the music on the CD I tried to transpose two main aspects of Tarkovsky's work. The first aspect is slowness, through a music which is really stretched out in time and where silence is important; it's melodic and sometimes repetitive. And the other aspect is violence, through written and improvised pieces and more 'atonal' and contemporary, or modern, music." But, he repeats, you can enjoy the music as music. "You know," he says, "the two French musicians didn't know Tarkovsky's movies at all - and Anja did! You don't have to know Tarkovsky's movies, but since two of the musicians were really into them, the other two responded." The results stand for themselves.
• François Couturier's group will performNostalghia - Song for Tarkovsky at the National Concert Hall tomorrow.
