Miranda Cuckson & Rand Steiger Come to National Sawdust in March

Violinist Miranda Cuckson and composer Rand Steiger collaborate on three works for violin and spatialized electronics, exploring the dazzling, immersive sonic potential of National Sawdust's 102-loudspeaker Meyer Sound Constellation system.

The program will feature the world premiere of Steiger's "Longing," written for Miranda Cuckson, and a re-imagining of his work "Nimbus Violin," originally created in 2016 as part of an installation at Disney Hall for the LA Philharmonic. These will be heard alongside Kaija Saariaho's four-movement Frises (2011), which layers repeating and reverberating shimmering gestures, and her delicate acoustic violin piece Nocturne (1994).

The performance is on Friday, March 25 at 7:30PM.

Called a "visionary and tremendously talented artist" (Sequenza21), violinist and violist Miranda Cuckson delights audiences internationally with her talents playing a remarkably wide range of music, from older eras to the most current creations. She has in recent years become one of the most acclaimed performers of contemporary music, playing innumerable new works and moving new creations more into the center of musical life. Kaija Saariaho is among the most important Finnish composers of her time and one of the leading composers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The New Yorker says "Saariaho's work ... moves between extremes of pure tone and noise, often finding a cryptic beauty in the middle zone." Rand Steiger is a leading figure among composers who integrate digital signal processing and spatialization in their music. The New York Times says "few composers blend classical instrumentation and digital technology as organically and eloquently," and called his music "by turns thrilling, gorgeous, threatening and funny."