Miranda Cuckson & Blair McMillen
Biography Miranda Cuckson & Blair McMillen
Miranda Cuckson
Called “top-notch in all respects” (Sequenza 21) and “an artist to be reckoned with” (Gramophone), violinist and violist Miranda Cuckson is a favorite of audiences for her performances of a range of repertoire, from well- and lesser-known classical repertoire to the most current creations. She has in recent years become one of the most sought-after performers of contemporary music. In demand as a soloist and chamber musician, she appears in major concert halls, as well as at universities, galleries and informal spaces. She performs at such venues as the Berlin Philharmonie, Carnegie Hall, Library of Congress, Teatro Colón, Miller Theatre, 92nd St Y, Guggenheim Museum, Bargemusic, Museum of Modern Art, National Gallery of Art, BAM, Strathmore, Monday Evening Concerts in Los Angeles, Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra’s Liquid Music series, and the Marlboro, Bard, Lincoln Center, Bridgehampton, Portland, Music Mountain and Bodensee festivals.
She has made lauded appearances as soloist with orchestras in the United States, Europe, the Middle East and Asia, including her recent Carnegie Hall debut in Piston’s concerto with the American Symphony Orchestra and Leon Botstein, and performances with the Indianapolis (Saint-Saëns No. 3), Virginia (Bruch Scottish Fantasy), Long Beach (Korngold), Shanghai (Dvorak), Beijing (Tchaikovsky) and Jerusalem (Ponce) Symphony’s and Aspen Festival Orchestra as winner of their competition (Elgar).
Her first recording was a disk of concertos of Korngold and Ponce with the Czech National Symphony, on Centaur Records. She subsequently made recital CDs of seminal 20th-century American music for Centaur: music by Ross Lee Finney, Ralph Shapey (2-CD set) and Donald Martino. These were awarded grants from the Copland and Ditson Funds. In 2010, Vanguard Classics released “the wreckage of flowers”, solo and duo music by Michael Hersch. Releases in 2014 included “Melting the Darkness”, solo microtonal and electronics pieces by Xenakis, Haas, Bianchi and more; and Sessions’ Sonata for solo violin, Carter’s Duo and a duo by Jason Eckardt with Blair McMillen (Urlicht). Her recording of Nono’s “La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura” for violin and electronics (Urlicht) with Christopher Burns, was named a Best Classical Recording of 2012 by the New York Times. Her first CD for ECM Records, violin/piano music by Bartók, Schnittke and Lutoslawski with pianist Blair McMillen, will be released in 2016.
She is director of the not-for-profit Nunc which she founded in 2007, and a member of counter)induction. As guest curator at National Sawdust, she presents premieres of new works and performs solo and with ensembles. In addition to working with emerging composing talents, she has collaborated with established composers such as Dutilleux, Carter, Adès, Sciarrino, Adams, Boulez, Hyla, Mackey, Crumb, Lachenmann, Saariaho, Davidovsky, Hurel, Iyer, Bermel, Shaw, Lindberg, Wyner, Haas, Murail, Wuorinen and Currier.
In 2012, the McKim Fund of the Library of Congress commissioned for her a work by Harold Meltzer, which she performed on Fritz Kreisler’s Guarneri violin. A champion of Shapey’s music, she has curated/performed in concerts of his music on Miller Theatre’s Composer Portraits and Contempo at the University of Chicago. She has performed often with ensembles including Continuum, Sequitur, Talea Ensemble, ICE, Da Capo Chamber Players, Locrian Chamber Players, CollideOScope and Fonema Consort. She was the violinist of Argento Chamber Ensemble from 2003-2011, and founding violinist for several years in ACME, the Astoria Music Society and the Momenta Quartet.
She is interested in all forms of art and enjoys projects such as Barber’s Concerto with the New York City Ballet, the Stravinsky Concerto on the Guggenheim Museum’s “Works and Process” as part of the Balanchine centennial, Stravinsky’s Duo Concertant with the State Ballet of Georgia, and various works with New Chamber Ballet and the New York Choreographic Institute. With Nunc, she produced the premiere of “On the Threshold of Winter”, a fully staged chamber opera by Michael Hersch.
Miranda studied at The Juilliard School, beginning at age 9 in the Pre-College and continuing for her BM, MM and DMA degrees (as a C.V. Starr Fellow). She was awarded Juilliard’s Presser Award and the Richard F. French Prize for best doctoral dissertation. Her teachers included Felix Galimir, Robert Mann, Dorothy DeLay, Shirley Givens, and for chamber music, Fred Sherry and the Juilliard Quartet. She is on the violin faculty at Mannes College and the Composers Conference, and has given masterclasses and seminars at many conservatories and universities.
A United States citizen, she was born in Sydney, Australia and is of Austrian/Jewish, English and Taiwanese descent. Cuckson, an old English name originally found in Yorkshire, is pronounced “Cookson”, as in the word to “cook”.
Blair McMillen
has established himself as one of the most versatile and sought-after pianists today. The New York Times has described him as “riveting,” “prodigiously accomplished and exciting,” and as one of the piano’s “brilliant stars.”
McMillen has performed in major venues both traditional and avant-garde: from Carnegie Hall, the Moscow Conservatory, Lincoln Center, Caramoor, Miller Theatre, and the Library of Congress; to (le) Poisson Rouge, Galapagos, and the Knitting Factory. Highlights from recent seasons include the Prokofiev Piano Concerto No. 1 at the Bard Music Festival, the Walter Piston Concertino for Piano in Carnegie Hall, and numerous appearances with the New York Philharmonic, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, and Albany Symphony.
2014 also saw McMillen’s debut at the Gilmore International Keyboard Festival, where he performed a solo recital featuring Morton Feldman’s Triadic Memories (a McMillen calling card; Alex Ross praised his “acute feeling for those remarkable passages…”) right on the heels of a sold-out performance with his tour de force piano sextet, Grand Band. Of his solo performance, the Kalamazoo Gazette wrote, “McMillen played with complete control, meticulously observing Feldman’s tempos, meters, and dynamics, making the high notes sing and the bass resonant…It was like watching the stars come out on a clear night by Lake Michigan, exquisitely played.”
Blair McMillen leads a multifarious musical life as pianist, chamber musician, conductor, and improviser. He thrives on playing a wide variety of musical styles: from medieval keyboard manuscripts to improvisation-based music of all types; from Classical/Romantic-era piano repertoire to the music of young 21st-century composers. Known for imaginative and daring programming, McMillen has premiered hundreds of new works both as a soloist and with numerous ensembles. He constantly collaborates with composers and artists of other genres in commissioning works that stretch the boundaries of the piano and the traditional recital format.
McMillen is pianist for the Naumburg Award-winning Da Capo Chamber Players, the American Modern Ensemble, and the six-piano Grand Band, among others. He is the co-founder and co-director of the Rite of Summer Music Festival, an alt-classical outdoor concert series. Held on New York City’s Governors Island, Rite of Summer celebrated its fourth season in 2014 with eleven world premieres and concerts by Ethel, Iktus Percussion, Grand Band, and Dawn of Midi.
Blair McMillen holds degrees from Oberlin College, the Juilliard School, and the Manhattan School of Music. He lives in New York City, and has served on the music faculty at Bard College and Conservatory since 2005.
