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 offered 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 opened 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 played 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 registered as sound.

Novacek’s piano, understated and coloristic by design rather than harmonically grounding, was shaped with an ear to the whole conversation; he was already, in this first work, no mere accompanist. The tension between a dying man’s circumstances and his music’s late-arriving brightness was, 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 thinned 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, by Josefowicz achieved not through mere illustration but through a tone colour so unstable not a single timbre was 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 and receiving its Australian premiere on this tour – supplied 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 carried across a mythic energy from the Szymanowski – another metamorphosis! – as she sang 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 made 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 too solid flesh to the aesthetic bones. Exquisite, moving and compelling on both counts at once.

Stravinsky’s Divertimento from Le Baiser de la fée (The Fairy’s Kiss) is a 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 played from memory, and it showed: freed from the score, she was at her most extroverted, seizing on every scrap of fun – yes, why not? – Stravinsky provides and running through the violin’s whole palette of colour as though barefoot through a garden, daring the instrument to keep up.

But this was also the work where Novacek’s contribution stepped fully into the light. Stravinsky writes for the piano here as a genuine second protagonist, and Novacek took the part with the same rhythmic angularity and harmonic wit Josefowicz brought to the violin line – his voicing of the Danses suisses’ distorted salon tunes as sharply characterised as her own. The piano didn’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.