In May and June 2025 Cassandra Miller’s Bel Canto toured to Wigmore Hall, the Elbphilharmonie, and the Aldeburgh Festival, with a further performance of the programme – which presents the piece alongside Boulez’s Le Marteau sans maître – featured at the BBC Proms in Gateshead on 27 July.
The 17-minute work is performed by a starry lineup of soloists assembled by Sean Shibe, comprising Ema Nikolovska, Adam Walker, Mira Benjamin, Colin Alexander, Ruth Gibson, and Matthew Hunt. The unconducted work is scored for two groups of instruments – a string trio, and guitar, flute and clarinet – and mezzo soprano. It is a portrait of Maria Callas, based on her live recordings of Puccini’s Vissi d’arte, in which instruments zoom in on minute details—as a magnifying glass getting closer and closer to the vibrato and swoops of her specific voice— to understand her physical presence. As the piece unfolds, it tracks the changing character of her vibrato, swoops and portamenti across her career, as her voice aged and transformed.
“Time slows down to allow for an engagement with detail, for a submersion in the sound, and for meditative stillness”, says Miller of Bel Canto. “This piece also marked the beginning of sixteen years of making compositions based on pre-existing music that I love”. “How is it that I (even as a young girl from Canada) am so moved by Italian opera? If we repeat one phrase over and over, will we discover more about why it is so moving?” It was recorded for the Another Timbre album Songs about singing in 2012 by Juliet Fraser and Plus-Minus Ensemble; the piece appears again at Wigmore Hall with Manchester Camerata on 18 October 2025.
The tour renews several of the players’ relationships with Miller’s music. In 2024 Shibe premiered and toured Miller’s guitar concerto Chanter with Dunedin Consort – a work he returns to at the Glasshouse International Centre for Music with Royal Northern Sinfonia in February 2026. 2024 also saw Shibe and Nikolovska premiere and tour Miller’s Dream Memorandum (It Reminded Me of the Truth) for voice, electric guitar and fixed audio at Wigmore Hall as part of their Virginia Woolf-inspired Orlando programme, which received subsequent performances at the Athénée Théâtre Louis-Jouvet and the Boulez Saal.
for mira, a solo violin work inspired by Kurt Cobain, was composed by Miller for Mira Benjamin in 2012. Though a highly personal celebration of Benjamin’s gritty, no-nonsense approach to playing, it has since found exponents in Sarah Saviet, Daniel Pioro, and David López Ibáñez.