Imaginative SFP Debut by Cuckson and McMillen

Violinist Miranda Cuckson (photograph by John Rogers, courtesy of SFP)

Last night in Herbst Theatre, San Francisco Performances (SFP) began its Great Artists and Ensembles series with a duo performance by violinist Miranda Cuckson and pianist Blair McMillen both making their SFP recital debuts. I first became aware of Cuckson during my Examiner.com days, which I wrote a review of her recording of Luigi Nono’s “La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura” (the distant nostalgic utopian future) in July of 2013, scored for violin and electronics. I was no stranger to this music, since the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players and the Istituto Italiano di Cultura joined forces in presenting a performance in March of 2010. Much more recently, I listened to Cuckson’s performances at the 2021 Ojai Festival thanks to video streaming.

Through those past experiences I took Cuckson to be an adventurous spirit. Last night I experienced that adventure through her approach with McMillen to four composers, at least three of whom were probably familiar to most of the audience. Both halves of her program involved imaginative couplings. She began with Leoš Janáček’s sonata for violin and piano, coupled with the third of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 30 sonatas, composed in the key of G major. The second half paired the Soviet Union with American folk music, the latter being Ross Lee Finney’s Fiddle-doodle-ad collected arrangements of eight folk tunes. The Soviet composer was Sergei Prokofiev, represented by his Opus 80 (first) violin sonata in F minor.

This made for an engaging overall journey, and both Cuckson and McMillen brought crystal clarity to the many rhetorical gestures that breathed life into all four of the offerings. Many of those gestures delivered the sort of intensity that makes the attentive listener sit up and take notice. At the same time, however, there was a freshness to the Beethoven selection, particularly in the grazioso tempo of the middle-movement minuet, that banished any thoughts of “same old Beethoven.”

Following up on the inventive approaches to the four works on the program, Cuckson and McMillen turned to a currently active composer for their encore selection. They played the first movement of a suite by Anthony Cheung entitled Elective Memory, in which Beethoven was the source of the memory in the context of his elective affinity with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Musically, the movement begins with a fragment from Beethoven’s Opus 96 sonata, which sets the tone (so to speak) for a dialogue between violin and piano. Thus, after having led the audience through a diversity of familiar experiences, the encore took some of that familiarity and skewed it in an imaginatively new direction.