Concert review: Miranda Cuckson (violin)

In this invaluable recital by violinist Miranda Cuckson, part of the Time:Spans Festival, she compared combining instruments with electronics to chamber music, and the results bore out that observation. Robert Rowe’s Melting the Darkness (2013) made a flat-out gorgeous opener, as the electronic timbres intertwined deliciously with Cuckson’s longtime instrument, the ‘Bazzini’ Guadagnini from 1742. (She added later: ‘It’s in great shape these days’.) To follow came Lidia Zielinska’s 2004 Rapsodia for violin and CD, which creates a conversation between waves of double-stops combined with piercing electronic chorale figures.

At the centre was Steiger’s Longing (2021), a dreamy idyll using live electronics (with the composer at the console), which Cuckson has perfected to thrilling effect. Diego Tedesco’s Portrait Number I (2020) brought some mild humour to the evening, with his use of electronic sounds that harked back to the early days of the medium. And rather than her usual Hill bow, Cuckson opted for a slightly heavier one by Noel Burke, to bring out the work’s percussive effects. In both pieces, she found ideal balances between the violin and the electronics.

To close came a candidate for a 21st-century classic, Frises (2011) by the much-missed Kaija Saariaho. Its four movements radiated with the composer’s characteristic shimmer and a sprinkling of left-hand pizzicato. Throughout the evening, Cuckson, long a mainstay of the New York avant-garde scene, offered appealing modesty married to implacability – which often heightened the intensity of the scores.

Bruce Hodges