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,...