The third ECM recital by Duo Gazzana, the Italian sisters Natascia and Raffaella Gazzana, sets César Franck's Violin Sonata in A major among three far less familiar works. Ravel's youthful Sonate posthume, Ligeti's early Duo and Messiaen's Thème et variations frame it, all written by composers in their early twenties. The Ligeti appears here in its first recording, which alone gives the disc a place on the shelf of anyone following twentieth-century music.

Natascia Gazzana plays violin and Raffaella Gazzana piano. The programme was recorded in March 2017 at the Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI in Lugano, in collaboration with RSI Rete Due. Markus Heiland was the engineer and Manfred Eicher produced. The booklet carries an essay by Wolfgang Sandner on the Franck, translated by Paul Griffiths, together with comments from the duo on how the pieces connect.

Ravel wrote his single-movement sonata in 1897, aged 22, and it stayed unpublished until 1975. Its language still leans toward Franck and Fauré, though the restless violin line already points to his later music. Ligeti's Duo dates from 1946, when he was 23. Dedicated to his friend György Kurtág, it lasts barely three minutes and draws on Hungarian and Romanian folk music, with Bartók close in the background. Franck's sonata of 1886, written for Eugène Ysaÿe, builds four movements from shared motifs, and the sisters take a spacious, clear-eyed view of it. The disc ends with Messiaen's Thème et variations of 1932, a wedding gift to his first wife, the violinist Claire Delbos. Its long final variation anticipates the Quatuor pour la fin du temps.

In BBC Music Magazine, Rebecca Franks found the Franck fresh and authoritative, and wrote that "the poise the Gazzanas bring to both Ravel and Messiaen is impressive". Paul Driver in The Sunday Times described the Franck as "so spacious yet cogent, brought off with panache". Tyran Grillo of ECM Reviews heard the Ligeti as brief but rich in narrative, and Burkhard Schaefer wrote in Musik & Theater that the three-minute Duo alone justifies the purchase.

This is the CD edition, ECM New Series 2556, first released on 20 April 2018.