Two concerts at PS 21, Chatham NY
Miranda Cuckson, solo violin, August 28, 2020
Conrad Tao, solo piano, September 4, 2020

Miranda Cuckson and Conrad Tao held the stage at PS 21 on two successive Friday nights as part of a series of (mostly) contemporary music concerts at the open-air stage in Chatham NY, on August 28 and September 4. Both performers captivated their audiences with superb focus and transcendent technique, conveying a fierce commitment to contemporary repertory that gained force by virtue of the context of the pandemic. Played to masked listeners seated in a distanced pattern, the intense performances knitted musician, audience, and composers together into a powerful matrix of expressive power and imaginative adventure.
Cuckson’s program (Friday, August 28) meaningfully juxtaposed J. S. Bach’s Sonata no. 2 for solo violin with works by Elliott Carter, Pierre Boulez, and Mario Davidovsky. The gap of 250 plus years between the Bach and its companions seemed irrelevant, owing to Bach’s concentration of materials in space and their extension in time, both of which felt contemporary in the context of the music of his later colleagues, who almost seemed to have consciously chosen to respond to the challenges he set forth (and very probably did: anyone composing for solo violin cannot avoid a background awareness of Bach’s examples). Especially in the extended fugue which concludes the work, Bach and Cuckson were intent on going far beyond any expectations based the trajectory of the initially stated material. Indeed, transcending expectations could be taken as a theme for both concerts.
Alone among the contemporaries, Carter’s tribute to Aaron Copland seemed
epigrammatic and understated both in gesture and structure, seeming to be over almost
before it began. Atypically for Carter, the gestural dialogue felt restrained, perhaps
reflecting Carter’s estimate of Copland’s balanced temperament, inherited from their
common mentor Nadia Boulanger. A sense of restraint was felt in a different way in
Boulez’s Anthème I; while we expect stylistic challenges and adventures from this enfant
terrible of modernity, what we got seemed surprisingly retrospective, while in no way
failing to display the freedom of imagination and resourcefulness of technique
characteristic of the composer. Two elements made for surprising familiarity: a central
pitch, D, and a recursive structure clearly related to the rondo. In Boulez’s later manner,
and in contrast to the spikey pointillism of works such as ‘le marteau sans maître,’
Anthème I flowed in decorative figures and flourishes, almost like the foliage in a
Watteau painting but full of subtle dramatic surprises. Cuckson’s elegant bow arm was
called upon to render a spectrum of encounters between horsehair and strings, from
fluid melismatic writing to spiccato and cross-string techniques, all connected by a
graceful and subtle forward lyrical pressure. This was Boulez as a light-fingered
magician, pulling elegant rabbits out of his beret.
The capstone of the program, wisely repositioned to conclude it, was Davidovsky’s
Synchronism no. 9, a work that has become a modern classic and challenge for up and
coming violinists with which to prove their chops. I heard and reviewed Curtis
Macomber’s masterful rendition at the Bard Copland Festival in 2004 (Davidovsky had
studied with Copland at Tanglewood); at that time Macomber had walked on-stage, and
began playing into the empty spaces of Sosnoff Auditorium which transitioned from
resonating the acoustic sound waves of the beginning to offering electronically
enhanced resonance and then on to spatial expansion and lively dialogue with the
human performer. The impact was stunningly dramatic.
At PS 21, the acoustics of the open-sided shed along with Cuckson’s more subtle (or less
muscular) approach provided a different experience, as if the violin were the living
concertmaster of an electronic ensemble, one voice out of many in Davidovsky’s
interplanetary chamber ensemble. The overall effect was no less thrilling, nor did it
evince any less mastery of the instrument and the formidable performing challenges of
fitting together with the electronic track, both in its demands on intonation (the violin
has to adjust to the equal-tempered tuning of the synthesized pitches) and timing (the
solo violin sections that are constructed to sound improvisatory have to fit into narrowly
defined time-frames). Cuckson was able to fit seamlessly into the demands of the
electronics while sounding like she was in complete command of them. In a work that
one might imagine being similar from one performance to another, Cuckson was able to
shed significantly new light. The bookends of Bach and Davidovsky threw into relief the
contrasting roles of the violin: from multiple voices concentrated within the instrument
to an instrumental voice stimulating a multitude of external, responsive voices.
