Poros is the duo album of the French violinist Dominique Pifarély and the pianist François Couturier, recorded for ECM in April 1997 and released in February 1998. Its nine pieces sit between contemporary chamber music and improvisation, written almost entirely by the two players. For more than a quarter of a century it remained their only recording together, which makes it one of the quieter rarities of the label's late-1990s catalogue.
The session took place at the Festeburgkirche in Frankfurt, with Manfred Eicher producing and Markus Heiland as engineer. Pifarély, classically trained, had worked with Louis Sclavis since 1985, and in 1992 the two formed the Sclavis/Pifarély Acoustic Quartet, which recorded for ECM. Couturier had already appeared on the label with Anouar Brahem, starting with Khomsa. The duo itself began in the late 1990s. The title comes from the philosopher Sarah Kofman, and the booklet carries an excerpt from her essay in an English translation by David Macey.
Kofman's poros is a path across open water, found and lost again, and the music follows that idea of a route improvised through uncertain ground. The jointly credited Trois images opens the disc and returns later in the fragments of Images 4, 2, 3. Pifarély's title piece, at twelve minutes the longest, unfolds in a more tangled and argued way. The only outside composition is Warm Canto by Mal Waldron, from his album The Quest, recorded in 1961 with Eric Dolphy. Here Pifarély moves from delicate pizzicato into full, resonant chords. Couturier's Labyrintus and Gala give the piano a larger share of the writing.
Reviewing the disc for BBC Music Magazine, Nicholas Williams called it "a concept album stripped down to its essential concept" and found the performances "never overwhelming" and technically brilliant. He heard in it a mix of twentieth-century voices, from Grappelli to Shostakovich, Bartók and folk music. Writing on ECM Reviews, Tyran Grillo described a "tantalizing, if restless, chain of events". The two musicians met again on record only in 2025, with Preludes and Songs (ECM 2819).
CD, ECM 1647, first released by ECM Records in 1998.
