In June Manchester Collective toured Cassandra Miller’s Perfect Offering to Leeds’ Howard Assembly Room, Manchester’s Royal Northern College of Music, and the Southbank Centre’s Purcell Room. The ensemble work appeared as part of Patterns in Repeat, including music by Meredith Monk, Cassie Kinoshi, and Clarice Assad.
Individual on-stage groupings…enhance the idea of timbre moving across space. The piece is very slow-moving…the music seeming to just breathe above an underlying silence. The control of the players was phenomenal…boundary-pushing, but in a gentle sort of way.
Seen and Heard International (Colin Clarke) 28 June 2026
Perfect Offering is an 18-minute work for work for flute, clarinet, piano, and string quartet. Alex Ross described the piece, recorded by Explore Ensemble, as “extraordinarily beautiful”. Miller began drafting Perfect Offering during a period of convalescence, which also overlapped with the early days of lockdown. She recalls,
At that time, I had the quote in my head ‘ring the bells that still can ring, forget your perfect offering’ (Leonard Cohen), and the piece began to be about bells somehow—how they swing, and how they mark passing time. The piece is not at all about Leonard Cohen, but with this mantra-like quote in mind, the process of composing became a meditation on the imperfect perfection of this tiring body and all the uselessness of plans.
In 2023 Manchester Collective toured Miller’s birdsong-inspired string quartet Warblework – watch here; in 2025 they performed Leaving alongside Oliver Leith’s string quartet The big house in Leeds, Manchester, and London.
Perfect Offering was commissioned for the Ives Ensemble by De Link, Nieuwe Muziek Tilburg, who gave the first performance in the Netherlands in 2020. It received its US premiere at Northwestern University from their Contemporary Music Ensemble in April 2024, and in recent seasons has appeared with Wild Up, Evlana Ensemble, HERMES Ensemble, Ensemble Variances, and at the West End Micro Music Festival.