Four very different composers bound by searching for a solution to a question they were never asked: what to do with the violin and piano pairing after the dissolution of the “traditional” violin sonata?

This recital offers four equally disparate answers, delivered with all the artistry and intelligence one expects from performers and long-time collaborators such as violinist Leila Josefowicz and pianist John Novacek.

Leila Josefowicz: Fairy’s Kiss. Photo © Alex Jamieson

Debussy’s Sonata in G minor opens the program: his last completed work, signed “Musicien français,” composed as he lay dying in wartime Paris, its continuous-variation writing looking backward to Couperin and Rameau rather than forward to Romantic bravura. Josefowicz plays it with her entire body, the melodic line’s slow unspooling as much danced as bowed, the finale’s tumultuous joy registering as gesture before it registers as sound.

Novacek’s piano, understated and colouristic by design rather than harmonically grounding, is shaped with an ear to the whole conversation; he is already, in this first work, no mere accompanist. The tension between a dying man’s circumstances and his music’s late-arriving brightness is, this way, made visible as well as audible.

Szymanowski’s Mythes reaches, by contrast, for Mediterranean antiquity – Arethusa’s flight, Narcissus’s drowning, Pan’s pursuit of the Dryads, rendered through the ponticello, harmonics and quarter-tones that violinist Paul Kochański devised in partnership with the composer.

Josefowicz’s tone thins to a whisper at the ponticello moments, the panpipe harmonics in the Dryades genuinely uncanny, if not downright eldritch. Metamorphoses from myth into music as deft as anything in Ovid – nymph into spring, boy into flower – are achieved by Josefowicz not through mere illustration but through a tone colour so unstable that not a single timbre is lost. “What pipes and timbrals? What wild ecstasy?” Indeed.

Leila Josefowicz and John Novacek: Fairy’s Kiss. Photo © Alex Jamieson

Written for Josefowicz, Charlotte Bray’s Mriya – a Musica Viva co-commission with Wigmore Hall and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center that is receiving its Australian premiere on this tour – supplies the evening’s ethical centre.

Bray’s own program note describes “a persistent struggle… between the dream of freedom… and the darkness of war.” Josefowicz’s bardic delivery carries across a mythic energy from the Szymanowski – another metamorphosis! – as she sings soaringly, sorely, of arms and a people.

When the second movement’s innocence flees “in haste” into rising, tremolo-driven disquiet, the piano provides what Bray calls a “nervously energetic accompaniment”.  Novacek makes that nervousness palpable without tipping into agitation for its own sake, his rhythmic pulse as much the movement’s argument as Josefowicz’s melodic line above it. Mriya already succeeds in the abstract; understanding the war behind it adds solid flesh to the aesthetic bones. Exquisite, moving and compelling at once.

Stravinsky’s Divertimento from Le Baiser de la fée (The Fairy’s Kiss) is an homage to Tchaikovsky so thoroughly absorbed into Stravinsky’s own neoclassical idiom, via his violinist-collaborator Samuel Dushkin, that he later claimed to have lost track of whose material was whose.

Josefowicz plays from memory, and it shows; freed from the score, she is at her most extroverted, seizing on every scrap of fun Stravinsky provides – yes, why not? – and running through the violin’s whole palette of colour as though barefoot through a garden, daring the instrument to keep up.

But this is also the work where Novacek’s contribution steps fully into the light. Stravinsky writes for the piano here as a genuine second protagonist, and Novacek takes the part with the same rhythmic angularity and harmonic wit Josefowicz brings to the violin line – his voicing of the Danses suisses’ distorted salon tunes as sharply characterised as her own. The piano doesn’t elaborate the violin’s argument so much as co-author it, poetry-adjacent rather than in its service.

An extraordinary tour de force from both players.

Musica Viva Australia presents The Fairy’s Kiss at Adelaide Town Hall, 14 July; Newcastle City Hall 17 July and City recital Hall, Sydney on 20 July. More information and bookings here.