Musical alchemies are often forged in strange and unexpected ways, and this engaging album of music by Mozart, Pärt and Vasks is no exception.

The two Pēteris Vasks compositions particularly shine through. The rapt stillness and timelessness of Balta Ainava’s wintery soundscape is beautifully conveyed in pianist Mina Gajić’s shimmering filigree lines, while in Castillo Interior, cellist Coleman Itzkoff and violinist YuEun Kim produce effective contrasts between plangent, viol consort-type sounds in the work’s slow sections and resonant string quartet-like sonorities in the louder allegro moments. All three offer a nuanced performance of Arvo Pärt’s Mozart-Adagio – the Estonian composer’s minimally interventionist approach limited to adding sonic smudges and enigmatically positioned ‘wrong’ notes to the musical surface of the slow movement of Mozart’s Piano Sonata K280. Pärt’s reworking of Mozart is bookended by the latter composer’s two Fantasias in D minor (K397) and C minor (K475), Gajić’s fiery, agitated interpretations capturing the so-called empfindsamer Stil (‘sensitive style’) of both works.

The other two Pärt pieces are not quite up to the same level. While Itzkoff is impressive in the cello-and-piano version of Fratres – alternating a deeply expressive tone in the lyrical sections with punchy projection in the louder, animated sections – Gajić’s overuse of the sustain pedal results in unnecessarily blurred harmonies in the piano’s accompaniment. Gajić and Kim offer a decent enough rendition of Pärt’s well-known Spiegel im Spiegel, Kim going down a similar route to Daniel Hope (DG) in keeping vibrato to a minimum. Nevertheless, the slow tempo results in a lack of ebb and flow required to effectively execute the archlike shapes of each violin phrase. Renaud Capuçon and Guillaume Bellom’s interpretation (Erato, A/21) clocks in at well over a minute shorter than Gajić and Kim. This enables Capuçon’s lines to breathe naturally, and Bellom’s steady pace is near perfect. They almost match Tasmin Little and Martin Roscoe’s performance (Warner), which is pure Pärt alchemy.