Béla Bartók, Alfred Schnittke, Miranda Cuckson, Blair McMillen

For her ECM New Series debut, the violinist Miranda Cuckson and the pianist Blair McMillen chose three duo works from the 20th century: Béla Bartók's Violin Sonata No. 2 (1922), Alfred Schnittke's Sonata No. 2, Quasi una sonata (1967-68), and Witold Lutosławski's Partita (1984). Heard together, the three pieces trace how folk material, wit and strict form were handled across six decades of Central and Eastern European music. Cuckson, born in Australia and trained in the United States, wrote the booklet essay herself.

The disc was recorded in January 2015 at the Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI in Lugano and produced by Manfred Eicher, with Markus Heiland as engineer. Cuckson's ties to this repertoire go back to childhood. Bartók's First Rhapsody was a favourite of hers at eleven, and at the same age she played Lutosławski's Third Symphony at the Aspen festival. In her notes she points to the dichotomies the composers share: form and spontaneity, playfulness and seriousness, folk expression and abstraction.

Bartók wrote his sonata for the Hungarian violinist Jelly d'Arányi, one of his regular recital partners. Its two movements fold the music he collected in the field into a language shaped by Debussy, Strauss and Beethoven. The Schnittke is a single movement and his first polystylistic work, setting fragments of past and present against each other. Its subtitle hints at a playful treatment of sonata form, and many sections are aleatoric. Lutosławski composed the Partita for Pinchas Zukerman and Marc Neikrug and later orchestrated it for Anne-Sophie Mutter. Three written-out movements are joined by two short Ad libitum sections, where the players move freely within the composer's limits.

Before this album, the New York Times had praised Cuckson's "undeniable musicality" and Gramophone had called her "an artist to be reckoned with". Reviewing this album for MusicWeb International in 2016, Dominy Clements wrote: "The performances are stunning, and the recording equally so." He heard the Schnittke as "constantly surprising and quirky". For Annika Täuschel of BR-Klassik, the duo almost disappears behind the works, in a reading she called unpretentious and free of ornament.

This is the CD edition, ECM New Series 2446, released on 15 April 2016.