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World Premiere of Cassandra Miller's Swim and Performance of Duet for Cello and Orchestra

Sep. 20, 2023

On September 16 at Sage Gateshead, Dinis Sousa conducted the Royal Northern Sinfonia in the world premiere of Cassandra Miller’s Swim.

Around 16 minutes in length, Swim is a companion piece for Schumann’s Symphony No.3 (“Rhenish”) and scored for the same forces. Its material is derived from a plaintive brass chorale in the penultimate movement. The piece imagines Schumann going for a swim, evoking the repetitive motion of his arms, and letting his psyche dissolve in the deep water – not of the river Rhine, but rather a cool Canadian lake described by poet Anne Carson. “The piece is, all told, as much about Carson as Schumann,” Miller notes.

Swim was co-commissioned by the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra and Victoria Symphony, with support from the Hugh Davidson Fund at the Victoria Foundation, and Royal Northern Sinfonia; the North American premiere of the work will take place on November 5 with the Victoria Symphony, conducted by Kalena Bovell, at the University Farquhar Auditorium.

Miller writes of the piece,
"At first, I took each two-chord gesture of the Schumann excerpt and repeated it, in right-left slowness (and blurred it, as if underwater). Each section of Swim then explores images from Carson’s essay, “Water Margins: An Essay on Swimming by My Brother” (as found in the publication Plainwater: essays and poetry, 1995). In Schumann’s original, his chords are imbued with heroic, romantic ideologies, sounding grandiose. In Swim, they take on my own ordinary and resolutely non-heroic feelings about swimming, via Carson’s imagery: dull and vivid colours, quotidian repetition, and cold revery."

In its dovetailing of literary and musical sources of inspiration Swim recalls Miller’s recent viola concerto I cannot love without trembling composed for Lawrence Power, which premiered to acclaim in Brussels in March 2023. The 25-minute piece, described by Alex Ross as “music of bruising immediacy” (The New Yorker), finds twin creative wellsprings in the writing of Simone Weil and recordings of Greek émigré violinist Alexis Zoumbas. Zoumbas’ funeral laments were Miller’s starting point, ultimately creating in the piece an atmosphere of mourning that is, as Ross notes, “engulfing…music that reminds us how to cry.” 

Additionally, on September 28-29, Ilan Volkov and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra are joined by Charles Curtis for Cassandra Miller’s Duet for Cello and Orchestra at Glasgow’s City Hall and the Aberdeen Music Hall.


Excerpt from Duet for Cello and Orchestra/Cassandra Miller/BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra/
Charles Curtis, cello/Ilan Volkov, conductor

The Guardian has hailed the 30-minute piece as one of the finest classical works of the 21st century. The concerto is partly a homage the long cantabile lines of Bellini’s music. A meditative solo cello, see-sawing gently between two notes – “a steadfast voyager on a road laced with spangly seduction” (Kate Molleson, Guardian) – is the vehicle for Charles Curtis’ introspective performance practice, whose mood is offset by freewheeling, Romantic orchestral writing. Duet’s source material is the Italian folksong Trallallera, as performed by Maria Carta, whose recording Miller transcribed with painstaking accuracy to capture the finer details of her phrasing and musicianship.  

Miller discusses Duet for Cello and Orchestra with Volkov on his podcast. It is one of Miller’s many compositions that takes the human voice as an imaginative prompt. Maria Callas’ famous recording of Puccini’s ‘Vissi d’arte’ gave rise to her 2010 work Bel Canto for mezzo-soprano and six players; 2021’s La Donna draws on Genovese traditions of Trallalero street singing. Her latest choral work The City, Full of People, premiered this summer by the National Chamber Choir of Ireland and Paul Hillier, grew from her recollections of hearing the Thomas Tallis Lamentations as a teenager.

Volkov, Curtis, and the BBC Symphony Orchestra gave the world premiere of Duet at the Tectonics Festival in Glasgow in 2015. That performance of the work was released on Another Timbre in 2019. Curtis gave the North American premiere of the piece with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra and Alexander Mickelthwate, and the Swiss premiere with the L'Orchestre de Chambre de Geneve, conducted by Kanako Abe. Duet was also performed at the 2019 London Contemporary Music Festival by Anton Lukoszevieze and the LCMF Orchestra, conducted by Jack Sheen.

To learn more about Cassandra Miller, visit fabermusic.com.

Cassandra Miller
Swim (2023)
for full orchestra
2.2.2.2-4.2.alto trombone.2.0-str
16'

Duet for Cello and Orchestra (2015)
for cello and orchestra
pic.2.2.ca.2.bcl.2.cbn-4.3.3.1-3perc: t.bells/tam-t/BD-str
30'

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