Toru Takemitsu, Sofia Gubaidulina, Kim Kashkashian, Sivan Magen, Marina Piccinini

Tre Voci is the first album by the trio of the same name: violist Kim Kashkashian, flutist Marina Piccinini and harpist Sivan Magen. It is built around Claude Debussy's 1915 Sonata for flute, viola and harp, the work that introduced this rare combination. The trio places it between two later pieces it inspired, by Toru Takemitsu and Sofia Gubaidulina. The result is a programme about tone colour, texture and an elastic sense of time.

The three musicians first played together at the 2010 Marlboro Music Festival and decided the combination deserved more than one season. A year before this release Kashkashian had won a Grammy for her solo viola album of Kurtág and Ligeti. Piccinini is an Italian-American flutist, Magen an Israeli harpist. The disc was recorded in April 2013 at the Auditorio Radiotelevisione svizzera in Lugano, with Markus Heiland as engineer and Manfred Eicher as producer. Jürg Stenzl wrote the liner notes.

Takemitsu's And then I knew 'twas Wind takes its title from a poem by Emily Dickinson and was conceived to be performed alongside the Debussy. Its surfaces are sinuous and hard to grasp, with the harp producing harmonics and glissandi while flute and viola trace separate paths. The Sonata sits at the centre, in three movements from the Pastorale to a resolute Finale. Gubaidulina's Garten von Freuden und Traurigkeiten (Garden of Joys and Sorrows, 1980) is sparer still, with the viola often reduced to whispered harmonics. It closes with the recitation of a short poem by Francisco Tanzer, in German.

The album was widely reviewed. In The New York Times Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim described a "stellar collaboration of three musicians at the top of their game". Andrew Clements in The Guardian heard the Sonata performance as "more robust than it can be, though still subtle and sensuous". Dominy Clements, on MusicWeb International in 2015, wrote that if the disc had flaws he was "at a loss to point them out". BBC Music Magazine noted that the close recording catches every nuance, so that Debussy sounds contemporary with the later works.

CD, ECM New Series 2345, first released on 12 September 2014.