Tickets
General Ticket: $30
Member Ticket: $25
Supported by Susan Lacy, Steve and Michele Pesner, Clifford Ross and Nicolette Donen, and the Friends of the Fund for Music at The Church.
Acclaimed violinist Miranda Cuckson and pianist Blair McMillen join us for a late Sunday afternoon that weaves worlds together. Playing a selection by composers Eleonor Alberga, Lili Boulanger, Ross Lee Finney, Beethoven, and Prokofiev, the duo invites audiences on a sonic journey. Hailed by New York Times as “brilliant artists,” the two have received rave reviews for their performances and recordings. The Guardian said their “playing is frank and urgent, with powerfully stripped-back quiet passages and gritted-teeth ecstatic climaxes.” Come hear what all the raves are about!
Cuckson and McMillen’s musical partnership spans well over a decade. As a duo, they have played many recitals of music both old and new, including recently at San Francisco Performances, the Isabella Gardner Museum, and Detroit Institute of Art. They have given numerous world-premiere performances and have recorded recent violin-piano music by composers Harold Meltzer, Michael Hersch, Jason Eckardt, Donald Martino, and Elliott Carter, to name a few. Their 2016 ECM release of music by Béla Bartók, Witold Lutoslawski, and Alfred Schnittke, was highly critically acclaimed. Active as performers and pedagogues, they serve on the faculty at Mannes at The New School in New York City.
MIRANDA CUCKSON
Violin
Photo by J. Henry Fair
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Praised recently for “a rare style that fuse[s] precision and elegance with passionate intensity and successful risk-taking” [Berkshire Edge], violinist/violist Miranda Cuckson’s playing has, for many years, generated tremendous audience excitement and critical acclaim. In her wide variety of solo and collaborative performances, she continues to evolve and explore. Engaging with Western classical traditions and the many modern musical avenues she has ventured on, Miranda has pursued a personal path motivated by sincere interest and exploration, the expression of any human feelings and experiences, and the realization of virtuosity, craft, and invention. Her particular interests include the playing of stringed instruments in musical cultures and contexts, and the porousness of the arts of interpretation and composition.
In the past few years, Miranda has given celebrated concerto debuts with John Adams at the Ojai Music Festival and at the Vienna Musikverein playing Georg Friedrich Haas’ Violin Concerto No. 2, which she premiered in four countries. The live broadcast of the Musikverein performance will be released this fall as an album on Urlicht Audiovisual. Her live performance of the Ligeti Violin Concerto with the UC Davis Orchestra was also released as a commercial recording, on Centaur Records to great acclaim.
In addition to her frequent live concerts around the USA and in New York City, she has been a featured performer internationally at festivals including Wien Modern, Grafenegg, Sinus Ton, Le GuessWho, West Cork, Bard, Frequency, TimeSpans, Lincoln Center, and Ojai, and such presenters as St. Paul’s Liquid Music, 92NY, Miller Theatre, Tokyo’s Suntory Hall, Mexico City’s Palacio de Bellas Artes, the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, the Library of Congress, and the Cleveland Museum.
She is a core member of the American Modern Opera Company (AMOC*), which is working at the forefront of interdisciplinary creation. A passionate participant in collaborations, she is currently working on new duo projects with pianist Stewart Goodyear and harpist Parker Ramsay.
She and her frequent pianist partner Blair McMillen gave a recital at San Francisco Performances in 2023 and they perform at Boston’s Gardner Museum and the Detroit Institute of Art in 2025. Their acclaimed recordings together include their ECM Records album of Bartok, Schnittke, and Lutoslawski, the Grammy-nominated “Songs and Structures”, playing a duo written for them by Harold Meltzer; Michael Hersch’s “the wreckage of flowers”; and a landmark run of albums of duo and solo music by American composers Elliott Carter, Jason Eckardt, Roger Sessions, Ralph Shapey, and Donald Martino.
Miranda’s album, with sound artist Christopher Burns, of Luigi Nono’s haunting, 50-minute “La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura” was named a Recording of the Year by the New York Times, and they have performed it live a dozen times, exploring its spatial and theatrical possibilities in a wide variety of settings. Miranda’s solo albums, also acclaimed, include “Világ” featuring the Bartok Solo Sonata along with folk-flavored recent works; the Korngold and Ponce violin concertos; and “Melting the darkness”, a forward-looking compilation of seven microtonal/electronic pieces.
Miranda is the founder of non-profit Nunc, with which she has curated concerts and residencies and produced numerous premieres. An avid writer and speaker about music, she earned her doctorate (and all her music degrees) from The Juilliard School. She is on faculty at the Mannes School of Music at New School University.
As first-prize winner of the Young Concert Artists International Auditions, Narek was presented at debut recitals at Merkin Hall in New York and at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. He has also performed at Carnegie’s Weill Recital Hall and the Morgan Library and Museum in New York; Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum; and for the Washington Center for the Performing Arts, Lied Center of Kansas, Buffalo Chamber Music Society, Artist Series Concerts of Sarasota, Fla., Weis Center for the Performing Arts, and Arizona Friends of Chamber Music. In recent seasons he has performed as soloist with the Riverside Symphony at Carnegie’s Zankel Hall and the Bard Festival Orchestra at Fisher Center, and in recital at the Harvard Club, Ithaca College, and Evergreen Museum and Library in Baltimore. This season, Narek will perform as soloist with the Edmonton Symphony in Canada and in recital at Brownville Concert Series in Nebraska.
Narek has performed extensively in Australia, Asia, and Europe, including at the Musée du Louvre in Paris and the Palazzo del Principe in Genoa. He has appeared at the Tanglewood Music Festival, Marlboro Music Festival, Juilliard’s ChamberFest, the New York Festival of Song, Bard Music Festival, Bridgehampton Music Festival, Krzyżowa-Music festival in Poland, and Germany’s Usedomer Musikfestival. He has also performed as both a clarinetist and klezmer soloist for the Fiddler on the Roof in a Yiddish off-Broadway production. In addition, Narek recently performed and spoke at the State House in Boston for the 104th Anniversary Commemoration of the Armenian Genocide.
Narek was born in Armenia, and his family moved to Moscow when he was three. As a teenager, he won first prizes in the International Young Musicians Competition in Prague and the Musical Youth of the Planet Competition in Moscow. He graduated from the Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatory as a student of Evgeny Petrov, received a bachelor’s degree from the Juilliard School, where he worked with Charles Neidich, and then earned a master’s degree with Neidich at the Manhattan School of Music on a Leon Russianoff Memorial Scholarship.
BLAIR MCMILLEN
Piano
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Hailed by the New York Times as “prodigiously accomplished and exciting” and as one of the piano’s “brilliant stars,” pianist Blair McMillen has forged a musical life that is unbounded by convention. He is well-known for his advocacy of living composers and contemporary music, as well as for championing very early keyboard music and more recent neglected masterpieces. For more than two decades, McMillen has divided his time as piano soloist, chamber musician, music festival director, and educator/teacher.
Blair McMillen has performed in major concert venues in New York, throughout the United States, and around the world. Recent appearances include concertos with the American Symphony Orchestra in Carnegie Hall, solo appearances with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, and a 3-week solo tour of Brazil sponsored by the US State Department. He is a member of several prominent ensembles, including the American Modern Ensemble, the six-piano “supergroup” Grand Band, and the Perspectives Ensemble, among others. For 10 years he was pianist for the Naumburg Award-winning Da Capo Chamber Players. He has also performed with the International Contemporary Ensemble, the Knights, and the LPR Ensemble.
As a teacher and pedagogue, McMillen is in high demand. He has taught at Bard College and Conservatory since 2005, and he serves on the piano and collaborative piano faculty at Mannes at the New School in New York City. He regularly adjudicates at competitions and festivals throughout the United States and abroad. In past summers, McMillen has taught at the Elm City Chamber Festival, the Xi’an Festival, the Wellesley Composers Conference, the Samuel Barber Institute, FEMUSC (Brazil), and the Bennington Chamber Music Festival, to name a few.
His first solo CD “Soundings,” was released to critical acclaim in 2001. Since then, Blair McMillen has been featured on dozens of commercially released solo, chamber, and orchestral recordings. An album of two-piano music with Stephen Gosling, “Powerhouse Pianists II,” was declared “one of the finest piano recordings of the year” by NPR. An ECM recording with violinist Miranda Cuckson was hailed by The Guardian for “...playing that is frank and urgent, with powerfully stripped-back quiet passages and gritted-teeth ecstatic climaxes.” McMillen was featured on a recent release, Harold Meltzer’s Grammy-nominated “Songs and Structures.” And in 2021, Naxos released McMillen’s recording of Joan Tower’s piano concerto “Still/Rapids” with the Albany Symphony Orchestra.
Blair McMillen is the co-founder and co-director of the Rite of Summer Music Festival. Rite of Summer is a free, outdoor contemporary-music series held on New York City’s Governors Island. The festival has presented boundary-pushing artists such as the JACK Quartet, Bang on a Can All-Stars, Tigue, Theo Bleckmann, Todd Reynolds, Contemporaneous, and Don Byron’s New Gospel Quintet. Celebrating its twelfth season in 2023, Rite of Summer is the only annual music festival on Governors Island, a place the New Yorker has called “an enormous playground for the arts.”
Blair McMillen holds degrees from Oberlin College, Manhattan School of Music, and The Juilliard School. While at Juilliard he was selected as concerto soloist on a tour of Japan with the Juilliard Orchestra. While there, he won the school’s Gina Bachaeur Competition and the Sony “Elevated Standards” Career Grant. McMillen’s principal teachers have included Jerome Lowenthal, Robert McDonald, Sophia Rosoff, Joseph Kalichstein, and Byron Janis. He lives in New York with his wife Kay and son Conor.