Pekka Kuusisto

Pekka Kuusisto is a Finnish violinist, composer, conductor, and teacher born (in Espoo, Finland – a small city ten miles west of Helsinki) on October 7, 1976.  He is known for presenting unusual programs of music which are quite eclectic while maintaining their seriousness.  He has been known to sing at his recitals.  He also sometimes uses an undulating bow stroke which produces a subtly different sound.  As strange as it might sound, Kuusisto was the first (and – up to the present time - the only) Finn to win, in 1995, the Sibelius Violin Competition.  He was 19 years old at the time.  Here is a YouTube video of his performance at the competition.  Kuusisto began his studies at age 3.  His first teacher was Geza Szilvay at the East Helsinki Music Institute.  (Szilvay is well known for teaching young children.)  Four years later Kuusisto enrolled at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki.  One of his teachers there was Tuomas Haapanen.  Nine years later, he studied for four years at Indiana University with Miriam Fried and Paul Biss (husband of Miriam Fried.)  He finished his studies there in 1996.  He was 20 years old.  A very curious anomaly about Kuusisto’s career is that his discography is rather slim given his extreme virtuosity as a musician.  (That is very striking and reminds me of Norwegian violinist Mari Samuelsen’s discography which is also rather slender.)  Besides solo concertizing, Kuusisto regularly participates in music festivals around the world and often performs with ensembles focused on contemporary music.  Here is a video of a concert with Kuusisto conducting the Australian Chamber Orchestra in a performance of modern music, including electronics – one of the pieces shows the strings using what look like practice mutes, not regular mutes.  As far as I know, Kuusisto’s violin is still a 1752 G.B. Guadagnini. 

Jascha Heifetz quote

"I occasionally play works by contemporary composers and for two reasons: First, to discourage the composer from writing any more and, secondly, to remind myself how much I appreciate Beethoven." - Jascha Heifetz, violinist  

I'm pretty sure Heifetz said this half-jestingly. The serious half is what bothers me, although I might have said this myself.  

Nixon in China

I have written a few times regarding the need for new music, though perhaps not in this blog. I did write concerning the fact that we have no new violin concertos, as of 1948, which have gained a permanent place in the repertory.  Oscar Wilde once said: "If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all." If you think about it, this applies to ALL art. That's why dissonant, incoherent contemporary music has failed so dramatically and resoundingly. Nobody is interested in listening to it a second time. Mascagni's opera, Cavalleria Rusticana, has been performed over 44,000 times since it was composed in the late 1800s - about 350 times per year. By comparison, the modern opera, Nixon in China (by John Adams), has perhaps been produced 10 times and performed 50 times since it premiered in 1987 in Houston, an average of 2 times per year. I believe it may as well be dead. This opera, in fact, is one of the better known works of the Twentieth Century. After Elgar premiered his First Symphony in 1908, it was performed no fewer than one hundred times in its first year. There are over twenty recordings of it and it is still being regularly programmed by conductors around the world. Nowadays, composers write a piece, it is performed a half dozen times and then put away for good. Audiences really do know what they want and what they like. Composers should have been taught to trust and respect the audience's judgment long ago. Instead, modern composers have wanted to teach classical music audiences what is good for them to listen to; the audiences have not been fooled. Music is to the point where it sounds like it was written by engineers and mathematicians. We are back to square one. Perhaps what I hear about the modern concert hall being nothing more than a museum is true. We need new music more than ever - but not the kind we have been getting for the last sixty years.

Miranda Cuckson

Miranda Cuckson is an American violinist, violist, and teacher known for her lucid and translucent performances of contemporary works.  She is also known for her stunningly precise technique.  Her extremely fine, silken sound is often and uniquely juxtaposed against angular, rugged, and muscular music which she champions.  However, her tastes are famously eclectic and her repertoire very broad.  She has played complete Beethoven sonata cycles as well as – on the opposite side of the spectrum - music by Luigi Nono (La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura) for violin and electronic tape.  She is largely responsible for bringing the music of a single person - Ralph Shapey, well-known but cantankerous Chicago composer - to the general public’s attention.  Cuckson’s career has taken her to the most famous concert venues in the U.S., Europe, and China, including Carnegie Hall, Avery Fisher Hall, the Library of Congress, and the Berlin Philharmonie.  Anthony Tommasini, one of the most regarded music critics in the world at present, has described her playing this way: “Miranda Cuckson is a brilliant young performer who plays daunting contemporary music with insight, honesty, and temperament.”  (I should point out that her surname is often mispronounced: it is COOKSUN and not COXSUN.)  She first began to study violin at age 5, having arrived in the U.S. from Australia with her parents while still a very young child.  At the age of nine, Cuckson began her studies at Juilliard and went on to receive her BM, MM and DMA degrees there as well.  She studied with Dorothy DeLay, Shirley Givens, Robert Mann, and Felix Galimir, among others.  She made her recital debut in Carnegie Hall in 2003 playing an all-American program, and her concerto debut there in 2010 playing Walter Piston’s Concerto No. 1.  Precisely because she champions contemporary music, she has in recent years been a greatly sought-after advocate in that area of music performance.  She has also given numerous premieres of solo and chamber pieces, some of which have been written expressly for her.  Her father is composer Robert Cuckson and she sometimes plays his works, including several he has written for her.  This year, on February 3, she will perform a new work (at the Library of Congress) by Harold Meltzer, which was commissioned for her by the McKim Fund in honor of Fritz Kreisler.  The McKim Fund is tied to the late American violinist Leonora Jackson – Jackson played what used to be Joseph Joachim’s violin for many years but retired at age 36 and died in obscurity.  Cuckson’s first CD recording was a disk of concertos by Erich Korngold and Manuel Ponce with the Czech National Symphony, on Centaur Records.  She subsequently made four recital CDs of 20th-century American music for Centaur: disks of music by Ralph Shapey (a two-CD set), Donald Martino and Ross Lee Finney.  In 2010, Vanguard Classics released her CD “the wreckage of flowers”, comprising violin and violin/piano music by Michael Hersch, with pianist Blair McMillen.  Upcoming releases include solo and duo works by Anna Weesner and a disk of microtonal solo violin pieces. She directs the concert series nunc (previously called Transit Circle), which she founded in 2007.  Among the many organizations Cuckson plays with in New York are counter)induction, Sequitur, ACME, Talea Ensemble, Astoria Music Society, and the ISCM.  She was the founding violinist of the Momenta Quartet, with which she played for three years.  As of 2005, Cuckson has been teaching violin at Mannes College and also teaches classical violin to students of the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music.  She is on the faculty at the Composers Conference at Wellesley College and has given numerous master classes and workshops for both performers and composers, at schools such as Peabody Conservatory, Manhattan School of Music, and Temple, Cornell, Columbia, Yale and Princeton universities.  Since 1996, Cuckson has been playing the Bazzini Guadagnini, the one from 1742 (there are two Bazzini Guadagninis – the other one is from 1758.)  As were Eugene Ysaye and  Jascha Heifetz, she is a devoted tennis fan.  YouTube has several videos of her, one of which is here.