This album gathers three works for viola and orchestra by three Hungarian composers, all played by Kim Kashkashian. Béla Bartók's Viola Concerto, his last work, was left unfinished at his death. It is followed by Replica, written for Kashkashian by Peter Eötvös, and by György Kurtág's early Movement for Viola and Orchestra. ECM presents the three as a line of transmission running from Bartók to Eötvös through Kurtág.

Eötvös conducts the Netherlands Radio Chamber Orchestra. The sessions took place in 1999 at Muziekcentrum Vredenburg in Utrecht, with Manfred Eicher as producer and Markus Heiland and Stephan Schellmann as engineers. Paul Griffiths wrote the booklet essay. Kashkashian had worked with Kurtág for years and had recorded his Jelek for ECM. She had also played the Bartók concerto for three decades, and before these sessions she went back to the Hungarian folk music Bartók collected.

The Bartók survives in the version Tibor Serly pieced together from loose, unnumbered sketch pages. For this recording Eötvös revised passages where he was confident Serly had misread the manuscript, and Kashkashian changed some articulations and phrasings. Replica came from a commission by the Filarmonica della Scala, accepted in 1997 while Eötvös was finishing his opera Three Sisters, and it works as a kind of postscript to it. Five orchestral violas stand between soloist and orchestra, and the piece was premiered in Milan in June 1999 with Kashkashian. Kurtág's Movement is the first half of a viola concerto written in 1953 and 1954 as his graduation work at the Liszt Academy. He now prefers it in this shorter form.

Writing in Fanfare, Robert Kirzinger placed the Bartók "among the best modern renditions of the piece by a soloist at the top of her game." Rob Barnett of MusicWeb International praised her "dead true intonation" in 2000 and called the collection "brave and peppery", with appeal for avant-garde listeners and Bartók devotees alike. He heard Replica as dissonant and rough in texture, and the Kurtág as easier to take.

This is the CD edition of ECM New Series 1711, first released in May 2000, with a 28-page booklet.