Three early works by Galina Ustvolskaya (1919-2006), Shostakovich's pupil, who insisted that her music resembled no one else's, living or dead, and placed herself outside every stylistic school. The Trio (1949), the Violin Sonata (1952) and the Duet (1964) chart the years in which her stark, rhythmically relentless language took shape. Her colleague Viktor Suslin compared her work to "a laser beam capable of piercing metal", and these performers take that concentration at its word.

The violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja came to this music as a student in Bern, where she met the composer, and has said it has not let go of her since. Her partner is the pianist Markus Hinterhäuser, who had already recorded Ustvolskaya's solo piano music, and the Swiss clarinettist Reto Bieri joins them for the Trio. The album was recorded in March 2013 at the Auditorio of Radiotelevisione svizzera in Lugano, in collaboration with RSI Rete Due. Manfred Eicher produced it with Peter Laenger as engineer, and the booklet carries notes by Paul Griffiths and Jürg Stenzl.

The Sonata for violin and piano opens the disc, a single span of more than twenty minutes in which the two instruments follow divergent lines. Kopatchinskaja moves from almost toneless pianissimo to fierce attack, and Hinterhäuser keeps a steady counterweight at the keyboard. The Trio, in three movements marked Espressivo, Dolce and Energico, is the most conventional and lyrical work here, and her teacher quoted it in his own music. Its finale ends in knocking, pulsing pianissimo. The Duet of 1964 lasts almost half an hour, quieter and less violent than the Sonata but harder to shake off, with dissonant piano writing set against isolated, ghostly violin lines.

The Sonata and Trio were written in the last years of Stalin's rule and were not performed until after his death, as Daniel Jaffé recalled in BBC Music Magazine. His review gave the disc five stars. David Kettle wrote in The Strad in 2015 that the trio of players "could hardly be bettered as incisive, forceful interpreters". Seth Colter Walls, in Wondering Sound, credited performers and production with doing this often neglected composer "a dedicated and intense service".

CD edition of ECM New Series 2329, first released on 12 September 2014, in an O-card jewel case with a 32-page booklet.