Urlicht AudioVisual is releasing its first LP — and employing a unique jacket design to showcasing both sides of the album — in a limited-edition, 180-gram audiophile-quality vinyl. The album utilizes Direct Metal Mastering for maximum fidelity to the original high-definition sources, pressed by Precision Record Pressing, and includes an insert with complete liner notes and credits.
Violinist Miranda Cuckson has achieved international recognition as America’s leading proponent of new music for the violin. Her career delighting audiences as soloist and collaborator in a wide range of music spans three decades, and her recordings for Urlicht AudioVisual, ECM Records, and Centaur have been received with consistently high critical praise.
This newest release from Urlicht AudioVisual marks Miranda’s LP debut, and features three works closely associated with her on two very distinctive LP sides. Stewart Goodyear‘s “Solo; A Suite for Solo Violin”, commissioned for Miranda and debuted in 2022, comprises one side of the LP – five strongly contrasting movements in one engaging and delightful tonal-centric work drawing not only on on traditional classical forms but Caribbean-influenced melody and rhythm, reflecting Goodyear’s ancestral heritage.
The other side features two pivotal postwar works for solo violin: Iannis Xenakis‘s “Mikka S“, a breakthrough work with microtonal glissandi and dynamic voicings that places it among the most challenging in the violin repertoire, and Franco Donatoni‘s “Argot“, a work drawing on minimalism and late-20th-century European avant-garde styles, with moods that are at once playful and intense.
