“Humour is a tool of provocation and survival in the music of Schnittke,” writes violinist Miranda Cuckson in her sleeve notes. “A cheeky attitude anchored by deep purpose.” Which isn’t a bad summation of the commonalities between Béla Bartók, Alfred Schnittke and Witold Lutosławski – all composers who loved the jostle between wit and weight, spirit and logic, raw emotion and modernism. Cuckson and pianist Blair McMillen end up delivering less cheeky attitude and more of the deep purpose: their playing is frank and urgent, with powerfully stripped-back quiet passages in Bartók’s Second Sonata, a gritted-teeth ecstatic climax at the heart of Lutosławski’s Partita, and brutal attacks and silences in Schnittke’s extraordinary Second Sonata. Cuckson calls those silences “tongue-in-cheek”, but she plays them absolutely stony-faced.
