Alexander Gavrylyuk is speaking to me from a villa on Croatian island of Lošinj in the northern Adriatic Sea.

“I had to look it up on Google Earth,” I confess.

“We’re quite remote here,” says Gavrylyuk. “But it’s a beautiful little island, and it is absolutely spectacular.”

I feel a slight pang of guilt for interrupting the Ukrainian-Australian pianist while he’s taking a rare break from touring, but he’s relaxed and talkative. Stepping away from the piano at times is as essential as sitting down at one, he says, and in the Adriatic sunshine, he’s not feeling any kind of separation anxiety.

“It’s a healthy break for me. It’s good to not constantly be involved with the preparations and with the instrument itself. When you have the time and space to zoom out from the process, it can be useful to rethink or reshape your perspective, and to look for some new ideas and new approaches.”

“And it’s also good for my marriage,” he jokes.

Alexander Gavyrlyuk. Photo © Halls Lane Portraits.

It’s only a short respite, however. After dates in Europe, Gavrylyuk will return to Australia, to again share the stage with violinist and Australian Chamber Orchestra artistic director Richard Tognetti in a duo showcase ranging from Karol Szymanowski’s Mythes to Sergei Prokofiev’s Second Violin Sonata and Johannes Brahms’s Third Violin Sonata.

For all the apparent simplicity of one violin and one piano and the old adage of a job shared being a job halved, the duo is the most demanding of formats, Gavrylyuk says. “A solo pianist can disappear into a private world at the keyboard. “You are, within certain limits, free to follow the music wherever instinct takes you. But in a duo, another personality is always present: listening, responding, anticipating – and sometimes refusing to follow.”

Gavrylyuk and Tognetti know each other well, however, having previously worked together in an ACO program that included Shostakovich’s First Piano Concerto and a version of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. The chemistry was sufficiently strong that the idea of working together again seemed a natural next step.

“Richard is so imaginative, so open-minded, so progressive in his approach,” Gavrylyuk says. “And we clicked on perhaps 90 percent of ideas. It was actually very mutually inspiring, to fuel the process with our ideas and our perspectives.”

Richard Tognetti. Portrait © Georges Antoni

Tognetti, too, is alert to the complexities in duo playing. A violin-and-piano partnership does not always result in an equal relationship between the two instruments, he says, recalling a performance he saw by the Russian cellist Daniil Shafran playing with a pianist at the Huntington Estate Music Festival in regional NSW in the mid-1990s. Shafran insisted that the piano be pushed to the back of the stage while he was elevated on a large pedestal.

“It got worse and worse and worse to the point where Shafran insisted we had to put a cover over the piano, like a blanket,” Tognetti recalls. “For me, that’s an anti-duo attitude – pianist-as-accompanist or invisible partner.”

There’s no hierarchy with Gavrylyuk, he adds. “Sasha [the Russian diminutive for Alexander] is one of the great pianists on the planet. He’s not here as an accompanist. This is something closer to a musical democracy.”

For Gavrylyuk, though, it’s less like politics and more like tennis – not because the musicians are competing, but because each is constantly reading the other.

“There are two psychological perspectives in play,” he says. “One has to find a common language and try to breathe and align the heartbeat together, and see how the music can then pick that up. Our challenge as performers, is in surrendering to the natural flow that gets created with this alignment.”

That intimacy makes the relationship between the players particularly important, says Tognetti. “It really helps if you like each other,” he laughs. “Categorically!”

“You can survive being in a band or a quartet or an orchestra when you’re not loving someone’s playing. But in a duo, that becomes … ridiculous.”

Alexander Gavyrlyuk. Photo © Halls Lane Portraits.

The repertoire chosen for the upcoming concert is equally challenging for both musicians. Szymanowski’s Mythes, Op. 30, seldom heard in Australia, is a work of extraordinary inventiveness says Gavrylyuk. Its relative neglect makes it all the more attractive, he says.

“I think he’s underappreciated somehow,” he says. “His music is so much about nature and mythology and sensuality, and there’s so much imagination in this music.”

The three movements of Mythes – The Fountain of Arethusa, Narcissus and Pan and the Dryads – draw on Greek mythology, but Gavrylyuk is wary of treating them simply as musical storytelling.

“Mythology is almost an excuse to enter another state of perception,” he says. “In The Fountain of Arethusa, for example, the listener need not imagine a literal landscape of water. The sound becomes water, water becomes light, and light becomes atmosphere.”

Tognetti comes to the music from another angle, through the prism of movement and theatre. As a teenager, he performed the three pieces in a dance project directed by Graeme Murphy.

“I played them with Dennis Hennig and it was an amazing experience – I was 18 or 19, something like that – and it became one of those memories that you cherish but don’t ever access. Coming back to it has been fascinating. And Mythes is an unsung part of the violin repertoire. A lot of people play the first movement, but few play all three of them together.”

Richard Tognetti. Photo © Maria Boyadgis

From Szymanowski, the program moves to Prokofiev’s Second Violin Sonata, originally conceived as a flute sonata before being reworked for violin and piano.

“Prokofiev is a very different type of animal,” Gavrylyuk says.

He imagines the music as a sudden gust of fresh air: “as if someone opened the window and the fresh oxygen entered the room.”

Then, Brahms’s Third Violin Sonata in D minor takes the listener to quieter, more reflective place. Gavrylyuk describes it as the “inner world” of the recital. “It’s the world we don’t see or don’t always express, perhaps,” he says. “It’s really the introspective type of perception of the reality of human experience.”

The recital also brings the two musicians’ very different experiences of place into the conversation. Tognetti’s relationship with Australia has long been central to his artistic identity. Gavrylyuk, meanwhile, who was born in Ukraine, has become deeply embedded in the musical life of his adopted nation.

“It’s so interesting to observe yourself through the lens of a society different to the one you grew up in,” Gavrylyuk says. “It’s very enriching in terms of musical breadth because it widens your horizons, you can on how differently you can look at the same truth or the same idea.”

That instinct – to question a familiar way of hearing or seeing something – is likely to be useful when the two musicians meet on stage, he says.

“We’re searching for that artistic truth together, each from our own perspectives.”

Alexander Gavryluk and Richard Tognetti perform at City Recital Hall, Sydney on 14 October.

A Zoki Presents event.