Nunc at UW Madison March 21-23

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Nunc visits the School of Music at the University of Wisconsin at Madison for a residency March 21-23. The concert in Mills Hall on March 22 features – as part of UW’s four-day George Crumb festival – Crumb’s “Eleven Echoes of Autumn” and “Four Nocturnes”, trios by Augusta Read Thomas and Sebastian Currier, and Laura Schwendinger’s “The Violinists in my Life”, a five-movement violin/piano duo composed for a consortium of performers including Miranda Cuckson.

Nunc will work with student composers on March 22 and give instrumental masterclasses on March 23.

Miranda Cuckson, violin
Blair McMillen, piano
Ben Fingland, clarinet

Laura dark

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Davidovsky concerts at the Teatro Colón in Argentina

Nunc is thrilled to perform two concerts of Mario Davidovsky’s music at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Celebrating Davidovsky’s 80th birthday, the program will include ensemble and solo works, including pieces with voice and with electronics. In addition to these concerts, there will a talk and performance on August 17.

August 15 and 16, 2014
8:30pm

Tony Arnold, soprano
Jason Vieaux, guitar
Miranda Cuckson, violin
Richard O’Neill, viola
Fred Sherry, cello
Donald Palma, bass
Barry Crawford, flute
Benjamin Fingland, clarinet
Aleck Karis, piano

Programs include:
Romancero for voice and enesmble
Quartetto No. 1 for flute and strings
Quartetto No. 3 for piano and strings
Festino for guitar, viola, cello, bass
Duo Capriccioso for violin and piano
Synchronisms No. 6 for piano and electronics
Synchronisms No. 10 for guitar and electronics
Synchronisms No. 12 for clarinet and electronics

 

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Premiere of “On the Threshold of Winter” by Michael Hersch – June 25 at BAM

June 25, 2014, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (Fishman Space)
7:30pm

article on Michael Hersch in the New York Times

BAM info and tickets

video interview with Miranda Cuckson about Michael Hersch’s music

Nicholas Cairns

A new monodrama by Michael Hersch, text by Marin Sorescu
“On the Threshold of Winter”

Michael Hersch’s newest work is an opera in two acts (ca. 2 hours). Scored for soprano and ensemble of eight, the piece follows the trajectory of Marin Sorescu’s wrenching final work The Bridge, in English translation from the original Romanian. Sorescu [1936-1996], suffering from terminal cancer, wrote The Bridge during a period of barely a month, mostly in hospital, at the end of his life.

Hersch writes:

Completed in 2012, On the Threshold of Winter is my first work for the stage. The search for a text, however, began in earnest much earlier. For various reasons the novels, short stories, plays, biographies, etc., which I had contemplated over the past two decades all in the end proved unworkable to me, primarily due to my own shortcomings. I felt incapable of bringing a musical dimension to each of the works in question. It wasn’t until 2010, when I encountered Adam Sorkin’s and Lydia Vianu’s translation of Marin Sorescu’s devastating last work, The Bridge – which chronicles the final weeks of Sorescu’s unsuccessful battle with cancer – that I knew I had finally found the material I wanted to work with. I did not know of Sorescu before reading this text. I knew nothing of his other work or his history. I simply knew that this slim volume struck and remained with me in unexpected ways.

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In the words of co-translator Adam J. Sorkin, “These poems … expressions of doubt, reluctant faith, protest … are a testament not just to human mortality and pain, but to resistance and triumph, a creative transformation of the struggle to accept fate and in the same breath attempt to defy its imminent finality … I suspect though, that there is no way to be immune to the harrowing content, even if one tries. The volume progresses chronologically from the beginning of November 1996 onward. A mere five weeks. Most of the poems are dated, and the inexorable momentum of poem after poem toward Sorescu’s death seems to make the book something like a medieval tableau, a dance of death arranged as a procession of still living poems.”
 (artwork by Nicholas Cairns)

 

Nunc at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University

Nunc performs at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, at the invitation of composer-in-residence Sebastian Currier. The program, at 8pm on both February 7 and 8, is:

David Rakowski:  selections from Etudes for piano
Johannes Brahms: Horn Trio, Op. 40
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Brian Ferneyhough:  Intermedio alla Ciaconna for violin
Gyorgy Ligeti: Horn Trio

Michael Atkinson, horn
Blair McMillen, piano
Miranda Cuckson, violin

Concert info here

Broadcast and interview with David Osenberg and WWFM radio

Nunc at Tenri Institute

Concert at Tenri Institute on West 13th street in Manhattan. The program is:

Sofia Gubaidulina:  Dancer on a Tightrope
Cenk Ergun: Dolce Far Niente
Gilad Cohen: Trio for a Spry Clarinet, Weeping Cello and Ruminating Harp
Alexander Goehr: manere
Anton Arensky: Quartet op. 35 for violin, viola and two cellos

Julia Bruskin, cello
Miranda Cuckson, violin
Ben Fingland, clarinet
Sivan Magen, harp
Melissa Reardon, viola
Sophie Shao, cello
Ning Yu, piano

8pm
Tickets at the door: $15/10

 

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Concert Tribute to Ralph Shapey

all Ralph Shapey works:

Piano Quintet (2002)
String Quartet No. 10 “Quartet d’Amore” (2000)
Five for violin and piano (1960)
Two for Five (Concerto Grosso) for clarinet and string quartet (2002)

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Miranda Cuckson, violin
Cyrus Beroukhim, violin
David Fulmer, viola
Chris Gross, cello
Blair McMillen, piano
Charles Neidich, clarinet

presented by the University of Chicago and Contempo

Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, 915 East 60th St
6:30pm pre-concert discussion with Miranda Cuckson, Shulamit Ran and Andrew Patner
7:30pm concert

Following her acclaimed  CDs of Shapey’s violin works and two concerts of his music in New York, Miranda Cuckson continues her advocacy of this composer’s music with a team of Shapey champions, including Charles Neidich, who premiered this clarinet quintet with the Juilliard Quartet after Shapey’s death, and David Fulmer, one of Shapey’s last composition students.

Got to be Modernistic

Friday January 18, 2013 • 8pm • FREE
Mannes Concert Hall
150 West 85th St. NYC

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Miranda Cuckson, violin and viola
Adrian Morejon, bassoon
Joseph Brent, mandolin
Alex Lipowski, percussion
Ning Yu, piano
Mary Nessinger, mezzo-soprano
Matei Varga, piano

Sofia Gubaidulina    Quasi Hoquetus  bassoon, viola, piano
David Loeb  Nocturne  mandolin and violin
Iannis Xenakis  Dikhthas for violin and piano
Georges Aperghis   Requiem furtif  violin and claves
Michael Hersch  in the hospital yard   violin and piano
Charles Wuorinen  Visible   voice and violin
James P. Johnson, arr. J. Brent  You’ve Got to be Modernistic  violin and mandolin