Album: Carolin Widmann & Simon Lepper, Phantasy Of Spring, ECM

On Phantasy of Spring, Widmann & Lepper deftly demonstrate how different 20th-centuruy composers tried to negotiate the tricky territory where violin and piano coexist.

Schonberg circumnavigated the problem by making the paiano an accompaniment to his Phantasy for Violin, while Bernd Alois Zimmermann employed all manner of distractions to make his Sonate fur VIoline und Klavier palatable. Decades later, Feldman and Xenakis were more succesful, the latter's spiky Dikhthas confronting the instruments' timbral antipathy, while Feldman's Spring of Chosroes separates the relationship out into sparse individual flecks of sound.

Download this: Spring of Chosroes, Dikhthas