This programme sets Dmitri Shostakovich's Sonata for viola and piano, Op. 147, his last work, beside two pieces by North American composers in which percussion joins the viola. Kim Kashkashian has explained the pairing through the percussive piano writing of the sonata. That quality links it to Pourtinade by Linda Bouchard and Redwood by Paul Chihara. The two new works fill the first half of the disc, and the sonata, at about thirty-one minutes, the second.

Kashkashian plays with the pianist Robert Levin, her partner on two earlier ECM albums, Elegies (1986) and the Hindemith viola sonatas (1988). The percussionist in the first two works is Robyn Schulkowsky, an American born in South Dakota in 1953. The sessions took place in June and October 1990: Jan Erik Kongshaug engineered the Bouchard and Chihara pieces, Peter Laenger the sonata. Manfred Eicher produced, and Steve Lake wrote the liner notes. Dieter Rehm designed the cover around one of his own photographs.

Bouchard, a Canadian composer born in Québec in 1957, wrote Pourtinade in nine sections that the players may arrange in different orders, though each is notated in detail. At seventeen minutes it is the longest piece on the disc, with Schulkowsky's finely graded percussion set around the viola line. Chihara, born in Seattle in 1938, took the starting point for Redwood from Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints, and builds it from phrases passed between viola and tuned drums. The Shostakovich follows in three movements: a Moderato, a central Allegretto of compressed energy, and a closing Adagio of some fifteen minutes.

Writing on ECM Reviews in 2010, Tyran Grillo found that Bouchard's piece "finds precision in its looseness." Of the sonata he wrote: "This being his final work, it unfolds like the imminence of death and the timid promise of afterlife." He also admitted that the Japanese source of Redwood is hard to hear from the music alone. For him the closing Adagio of the sonata is a visceral swan song, its resignation broken by moments of affirmation.

This is the CD edition of ECM New Series 1425, first released in October 1991.