Miranda Cuckson has emerged in recent years as America’s leading exponent of new music for the violin.
Invisible Colors, her fourth recordings for Urlicht AudioVisual, features five virtuoso works for solo violin by three highly individualistic composers.
American master Elliott Carter‘s Four Lauds are portraits in music; in the composer’s own words, the works “intend to express gratitude to some of the musicians whose friendship has meant so much to me: Aaron Copland, Roger Sessions, Goffredo Petrassi, Robert Mann, Ole Bøhn and Rolf Schulte.”
Carter himself commemorated Stefan Wolpe upon his death in 1972 with these words: “Comet-like radiance, conviction, fervent intensity, penetrating thought on many levels of seriousness and humor, combined with breathtaking adventurousness and originality, marked the inner and outer life of Stefan Wolpe, as they do his compositions.” Miranda plays Wolpe’s complete unaccompanied violin music – the Piece in Two Parts for Violin Solo and Second Piece for Violin Solo – on this recording.
Brian Ferneyhough is a founding father of what has come to be called the “New Complexity” – a style integrating extended techniques with elaborate and intricate pitch and polyrhythmic notation. The two works included in this recording, Unsichtbare Farben and Intermedio alla ciaccona, are among the most daunting and challenging works in the solo violin repertoire.
Miranda co-produced the recording with Urlicht AudioVisual’s founding director Gene Gaudette. The recording was made in the performance space of National Sawdust in Brooklyn, NY,, one of the world’s leading venues for new music, jazz, and contemporary performance, and was recorded during April 2016 by audiophile engineer Sascha von Oertzen.
Invisible Colors is available in lossless download format (including high-definition FLAC and Apple Lossless packages with complete liner notes in .pdf format) from a number of digital outlets including meyefi.com.
The CD release is now available internationally, and the high-definition Audio Blu-Ray release will occur in January 2018.
