The title of this Resonus release is a fair summation of those relationships not only between the composers and artists but equally their music. Earliest are the violin sonatas of Elizabeth Maconchy, the First Sonata (1927) a tensile summation of influences, Bartók and Janáček but Berg too, from which is fashioned an arresting idiom remarkable from one barely out of her teens. The Second Sonata (1943) adheres to a similar four-movement format but is more assured in its modal and chromatic inflections, out of which emerges music whose wartime context affords a plangent expression that the headlong finale intensifies without resolving.

By comparison, Abstracts and a Frame (1971) finds Nicola LeFanu (Maconchy’s daughter) struggling to transcend the impersonality of a neo-Webern stylistic straitjacket, whatever the ingenuity of its underlying ground plan. Not so Giles Swayne (LeFanu’s cousin), whose Duo (1975) plunges headlong into a confrontation both between its instruments and that initially explosive rhetoric which is only gradually tempered towards a more equivocal while no less intense emotion. A tour de force, indeed, with the partnership of Malu Lin (Swayne’s wife) and the composer at its most responsive; the calmer though never merely passive manner of Echo (1996) provides an addendum to that earlier work and is no less tellingly rendered.

The sound conveys the immediacy of the music – except in Farewell (1996), its ethereal poise an ideal leave-taking. Editing and mixing were completed by John Rutter, who, as Swayne’s Cambridge contemporary, adds another connection to this intriguing network of relationships.