The German cellist Anja Lechner, best known to Gramophone readers as a founder member of the Rosamunde Quartet, works frequently with friends from across generic divides. She most recently appeared alongside jazz pianist and composer François Couturier on the crossover album ‘Il Pergolese’ (2/14), which Lindsay Kemp welcomed as ‘one of the most genuinely creative projects of its kind that I have come across’. This new disc is a less focused affair, combining cello and piano arrangements of relatively familiar miniatures by Federico Mompou (1893-1987) with items attributed to the philosopher-mystic-guru George Ivanovich Gurdjieff (c1877-1949). Lechner previously explored the latter’s musical legacy in the company of pianist Vassilis Tsabropoulos, also for ECM. A secondary strand is provided by Komitas Vardapet, born Sogomon Sogomonian (1869-1935), whose honorific names have been variously transliterated from the Armenian: soprano Isabel Bayrakdarian’s selection (Nonesuch, 12/08) was credited to Gomidas Vartaled. A damaged survivor of the Armenian genocide, this priest-singer-musicologist ended his days in a Parisian mental hospital. In fact residency in the French capital provides the one tenuous thread linking all the creative voices featured on ‘Moderato cantabile’. Couturier himself, solely responsible for several tracks, lives in its suburbs.

Production standards are reliably exquisite – one expects nothing less from this source – but I did find myself dropping off. Whatever the fancy aspirations set forth in the booklet-notes, the duo settle for relaxed, vaguely ethnic, New Age background music in which one piece segues imperceptibly into the next and rough edges are smoothed away. Purists will run a mile given the manner in which the material has been cut about, rescored and revoiced. More Canteloube than Bartók, more Einaudi than Nyman, the less harmonically adventurous tracks are just right for Classic FM’s smooth classics concept. That said, listeners in search of a mood of limpid repose could do a great deal worse. Lechner and her partner are seriously accomplished and sensitive players.