Miranda Cuckson / Blair McMillen CARTER SESSIONS ECKARDT

Violinist Miranda Cuckson and pianist Blair McMillen have already proven themselves an estimable duo for works by American Modernists such as Shapey and Martino. Their latest outing features Elliott Carter’s Duo for Violin and Piano (1973), a formidable piece written in the midst of Carter’s most compositionally rigorous period. And while the twosome emphasize the brittle, cutoff phrases that frequently appear in the work, they also do a deft job of pointing up the places in which violin lines melt into the resonance of piano chords (and viceversa). Thus, theirs is a rendition that juxtaposes rigor and grace, violence and gentleness; this versatility makes it one of my favorite outings with this piece I’ve thus far heard.

Composed in 1953, Sonata for solo violin is one of Roger Sessions’ first large-scale attempts at 12-tone composition. Clocking in at over thirty minutes, it is a bear of a piece, demanding both virtuosity and considerable thoughtfulness from the violinist to bring it off: Cuckson has both in spades. I particularly enjoy her traversal of the work’s last movement, a brisk “Alla Marcia” with incendiary passagework and double stops aplenty. Cuckson brings laser beam accuracy to the numerous tricky to tune passages.

Jason Eckardt wrote Strömkarl to complement the other pieces on this recording. It is based upon a Northern European legend of violin playing sprites who took up residence near waterfalls; depending on the rendering of the story, either charming passersby with music or leading them to drown. Eckardt captures this mischievous ambiguity with pixellated altissimo violin writing and brittle pizzicati; the piano is also given an angularly terse role to play. My money is on Eckardt’s image of the sprite being a wicked little beastie, but either way the piece is vividly characterful and a real workout for the performances; one they assay handily. (Christian B. Carey)

Matt Haimovitz THE 20th CENTURY CELLO - VOL. 2

For his latest ‘twentieth-century-only’ recital, the American cellist Matt Haimovitz serves up a distinctively mixed bag: four American works alongside two highly characteristic pieces by Hindemith and Britten.
The level of musical interest is high, the commitment to unfamiliar repertory commendable. As with the first disc in this series (12/95) the sound is spectacular, the playing technically first-rate but not always interpretatively spot-on. In the Britten, particularly, Haimovitz doesn’t seem consistently on the right wavelength, adopting an overly rhapsodic manner and, in the “Fugue”, a surprisingly cautious tempo. So I prefer the versions of this work by Tim Hugh or, as first choice, Robert Cohen. The much-recorded Hindemith arouses no such qualms, perhaps because its very explicit dialogue between plangent neo-romanticism and forceful neo-classicism suits this player better than Britten’s more understated style.
The four American works all earn their relatively modest disc time, even though the Harbison is a bit too winsome, in post-Britten fashion, for my taste. George Perle’s pair of miniatures, dating from 1945, are touchingly direct, and the set of Six Pieces by Roger Sessions (1966), though growing a bit predictable in their rhythmic organization, project a personality all the more winning for not being required to sustain a symphonic breadth. Most enjoyable of all is Mario Davidovsky’s study in the interaction between live cello and pre-recorded tape. While very much of its time (1964) it still has something to say, not least that an unabashed neo-romantic style is as good a basis for this kind of composition as a more radical modernity.' (Arnold Whittall / Gramophone)