TT 264: Miranda Cuckson, Alone with Her Violin

Especially: Stewart Goodyear's SOLO

The violin has a rustic side, an ancient call for fiddlers to set the villagers dancing.

Miranda Cuckson has always impressed with an effortless command of the hardest modern music. I first heard her on the 2014 album Melting the Darkness, which opens with the dumbfounding “Mikka S” by Iannis Xenakis. It’s an incredibly difficult piece, but Cuckson sounds like she’s crooning a blues lullaby.

Her latest is Világ, released earlier this year, a substantial offering of solo high modernism framed by an older classic of the repertoire, Béla Bartók’s sonata. Cuckson explains the unusual title:

“Világ”is a Hungarian word meaning “world” or “illumination.” It also resembles the word “village” in English. In Sanskrit, “vilag” means “to cling to”; in Hindi, “separated.”

Bartók was famous for using folk sources….In conjunction with the idea of “village,” this thread leads to a fresh insight: Cuckson is really a folk musician. Yes, the most advanced kind of folk musician.

Világ concludes with “Argot: two pieces for violin” by Franco Donatoni (1927-2000). The first page of the score looks like this:

Is this really folk music, you ask? Yes it is, at least in the hands of Miranda Cuckson, who plays the Donatoni as if it was written for her. As Louis Armstrong said, all music is folk music.

There are two new pieces from Cuckson’s large “village” of living composers on the album, “Sāniyā” by Aida Shirazi and “Solo” by Stewart Goodyear. The Shirazi is an appealing dictionary of extended techniques, all (in Shirazi’s words) “inspired by the game of light and shade, creating forms that appear and disappear all at the same time.”

Less expected is Goodyear’s contribution. “Solo” from 2022 is downright down-home, a fiddler in a pub offering tales of a bygone age. I am utterly taken with Goodyear’s harmonic conception. (I had heard Goodyear’s name as a concert pianist, but had no idea he was this kind of composer.)

Goodyear’s program note:

My love for the violin began as soon as I was introduced to music, and I actually wanted to be a concert violinist before I became a pianist. Growing up in Toronto, I was surrounded by the different sounds and styles of playing the violin, and adored both the techniques of the fiddler and the violin virtuoso. In Solo, I wanted to create a fusion of both styles in each movement, and therefore create a tour of my childhood with this work. The Waltz and Prelude pay homage to the Canadian folk tradition, the Dance is a fusion of Calypso and toccata writing, and the Chant and Elegy are through-composed, rhapsodic movements. The Elegy closes the suite, and is a very intimate and personal lament for the loss of life due to the COVID pandemic.

All the movements are great, with “Prelude” being a notable highlight.

The program on Világ is rounded out by the fierce Capra 4 by Manfred Stahnke, who says that piece “…Had to wait for a long time to be performed and is now realized in a wonderful manner by Miranda Cuckson.”

Full notes for Világ are on her site.

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Miranda Cuckson plays Bach, Stewart Goodyear’s “Solo,” and Iannis Xenakis’s “Mikka S” as part of Sono Fest! next week at Soapbox Gallery.