PS21 HouseBlend III: Miranda Cuckson and Conor Hanick perform Xenakis, Bach, Ives, and Copland
PS21 Center for Contemporary Performance
August 20, 2024
Chatham, New York
PS21 HouseBlend III: Miranda Cuckson and Conor Hanick perform Xenakis, Bach, Ives, and Copland
Iannis Xenakis: Mikka “S” for solo violin (1976)
Johann Sebastian Bach: Partita in D Minor for solo violin, BWV 1004 (c 1720)
Charles Ives: Three Selections from 114 Songs arranged for violin and piano (1922)
Aaron Copland: Sonata for Violin and Piano (1942-1943)
Xenakis’s music had a propensity for formal and mathematical complexity that seems at odds with, at times, a hyperbolic intensity of expression and emotional verve. It has always been thought that consummate art satisfies the balance of the constraint of rational structures and the affective, seemingly unfettered beauty of invention.
Mikka “S” is a case in point. The demands placed on the performer are extreme: string glissandi ascend, descend, speed up, slow down, and all must be precisely synchronized and performed in a rigid time frame. Two melodic voices on two strings intertwine in quarter tones with eighth tone oscillations. Droning softly in a microtonal duet, the work is a more challenging take on Szymanowski’s early “Dryads and Pan’s” opening measures. In Mikka “S” the two voices thrum, and then spread apart, wailing, whistling, and eventually converging in an octave. There is no doubt that there is theatre in this microtonal exchange: lovers arguing?, dueling cicadas?, flexing intensities simultaneously waxing and waning? This haunting section is followed by a second contrasting section in which two “characters,” one lower in pitch than the other, have an animated discourse that devolves to an angry dissonant seventh interval standoff. Is this episode a scherzo of sorts? A caricature of two yelping creatures? Or, is it merely a second chapter of the first entangled duo, now standing proudly apart? However one may regard the challenging earful, there are moments of romance, conflict, and even comedy. In spite of the contortions of fingering, Ms. Cuckson seemingly danced through these few minutes of gymnastics with ease. This was a truly remarkable recital opening.
Bach’s monumental Partita in D Minor, a dance suite for solo violin climaxing in the nearly twenty-minute ciacona, is the non plus ultra of the solo violin repertory, and always an occasion for the performer to make an important statement. Its extreme difficulty, owing to the real and simulated counterpoint, must not impede the poetry of what the performer can impart.
Ms. Cuckson’s monumental performance relayed each movement’s dance rhythm and affekt. Everything was performed with a balance of appropriate performance style with an articulation that expressed the line, the climaxes, the longing, and the humor. No passage was overwrought or labored, but given supple grace and beauty.
The grand chaconne is a set of variations on the same four-measure harmonic progression. Bach starts in D minor which concludes some 132 measures later after 33 variations. Then, a D major section begins, and rises to a brilliant climax (19 variations) to be followed by the D minor conclusion (12 variations). It is one of Bach’s supreme works, and in Ms. Cuckson’s hands, we were favored a stunning and majestic performance.
For the remainder of the evening, Ms. Cuckson was joined by piano partner, Conor Hanick, in works by two of America’s most cherished composers: Ives and Copland.
Charles E. Ives, whose works are now considered almost canonic, was only first championed for popular acceptance in the last decades of the twentieth century. Most of his music was written before 1930, and his self-published 114 Songs, gave curious connoisseurs a helping of both his most accessible and most thorny creations. His style fluctuates between monumental dissonance and the softest diaphanous textures. The three transcriptions for violin and piano provide a good brief sampling. The Housatonic at Stockbridge, which was used in the orchestral Three Places in New England, demonstrates how deftly the composer used ostinato and bitonality to impart something akin to a tone poem. The lyrics of Robert Underwood Johnson address the meandering river’s playful path onwards, associating its movement with the speaker’s own wanderlust. The pianist here paints the ripples, cascades, and gathering grandeur as the violin, as partner, is carried along. After a dramatic climax, a lingering reference to Beethoven’s Fifth echoes with a beautiful soft whisper. Mr. Hanick and Ms. Cuckson brought out all of the detail of this watery journey and gave the conclusion a blush of sentiment.
The poem Like a Sick Eagle, has a musical connection to the Xenakis work. The violin’s vocal line creeps and falls up and down adjoining intervals with near glissandi articulation: thus the portrait of the sick eagle unable to fly. The text is drawn from Keats’s On Seeing the Elgin Marbles:
My spirit is too weak—mortality
Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,
And each imagined pinnacle and steep
Of godlike hardship, tells me I must die
Like a sick eagle looking at the sky.
The poet, observing the ancient artifacts in the British Museum, sees something once glorious and noble in a time-atrophied state. The music expresses, with laden effort, a lament of the loss of “Grecian grandeur” by the “[W]asting of old time.”
The third song, from 1895, and dedicated to Ives’s mother, is Songs My Mother Taught Me. It is set to text by the Czech poet Alfred Heyduk, the same source for Dvořák’s setting in 1880. The rocking rhythm with simple tonal harmonies, drifting to some piquant chromatic passages, is a reminder of how beautiful and subtle Ives’s early works can be.
Aaron Copland’s Sonata for Violin and Piano (1942-1943) was written at the outset of our entry into World War II, and its affect is one to divert and entertain, yet is infused with the composer’s typical tinges of stolid sentiment and consolation. If any work can be termed “most characteristic” of a composer, certainly this sonata demonstrates all of the qualities that have made Copland a classic of the last century. The quartal harmonic blocks, the tender violin writing, and the interspersed hymn-like sonorities provide a neoclassicism that is never acrid or self-serving. The first movement is framed in a typical sonata form. The second movement, evoking plainchant, includes some material heard earlier. Finally, in the last movement, we hear Copland’s style in “Hoe-Down” and El Salon Mexico. It is also reminiscent of his popular ballets. A rondo, with jazzy variations brought some playful sunlight to the more concentrated fare tonight. Cuckson and Hanick were obviously enjoying the flair of this skillfully written and effective work.